It's easy to take a few things for granted about this trade: a defined apprenticeship, an eight-hour day, a safety standard that gets enforced instead of ignored. None of that existed when electrical work was new. It was fought for, over decades, sometimes with lives, and it's worth knowing that history instead of treating it as background noise.
The right to organize was won, not given
A trade that killed its own
In 1891, ten electrical workers met in a St. Louis boarding house to found what would become the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The trade they were organizing was genuinely brutal. Linemen and wiremen of the era earned somewhere around $8 to $10 a week by some accounts, closer to 15 to 20 cents an hour worked out over 12-hour days, seven days a week by others; the figures vary by source and city, but all of them describe pay that was low even by the standards of the day. IBEW-affiliated histories describe an industry death and injury rate double that of other industrial trades at the time, and in some cities, local accounts put the toll at roughly one in every two linemen and wiremen dying on the job; Boston-area figures from the early 1900s cite the same roughly 50 percent rate specifically. There was no OSHA, no enforced code, and no legal protection if a worker organized or complained.
What actually made it so dangerous
It wasn't just that the work was new. There was no apprenticeship system, so there was no structured way to teach a lineman what was and wasn't safe to touch, and no industry-wide standard for insulation, grounding, or protective gear. Linemen commonly climbed wooden poles wearing boots with metal spikes at the instep, gear designed to bite into wood for grip, not to protect against electricity, and rubber insulating gloves and boots existed but weren't standard issue or reliably worn, especially on jobs assumed to be low-voltage.
The bigger problem was the poles themselves. In a fast-growing city, a single pole might carry telegraph wires, telephone wires, arc-light wires, and the newer high-voltage AC wires for incandescent lighting, all strung by different, competing companies with no shared safety standard and often no clear labeling of which wire belonged to whom or carried what voltage. Wind, ice, or simple wear could cause a high-voltage wire to sag or snap onto a wire a lineman had every reason to believe was safe. A job that looked routine could turn lethal with no warning at all.
One death that made the danger impossible to ignore
That risk stopped being abstract on October 11, 1889, in Lower Manhattan. John Feeks, a Western Union lineman, climbed a telegraph pole at the corner of Chambers and Centre Streets to untangle a snarl of wires on a pole carrying fifteen crossbars. Because the job was telegraph work, assumed low-voltage, he wore his usual climbing spikes instead of rubber gloves and boots. Unknown to him, high winds the night before had caused a high-voltage AC arc-light wire a few blocks away to sag onto the same tangle of wires. When Feeks reached out to steady himself, he grabbed a live wire in front of a lunchtime crowd on one of the city's busiest streets. He was electrocuted on the spot, and his body remained tangled in the wires above the street for roughly half an hour, because crews first had to locate and cut power to the correct line before anyone could safely bring him down.
The death made front-page news that same evening and became the defining image of what New Yorkers had already started calling the "electric wire panic," a period of public alarm over the chaotic overhead wires strung across the city with no coordination or oversight. It helped drive the political push to bury power lines underground in major cities, and it later became a talking point in the AC/DC rivalry covered elsewhere on this site, since it gave Edison's campaign against alternating current a real, recent death to point to. For working linemen, though, the more direct lesson was simpler and grimmer: there was no reliable way to know which wire on a pole might kill you, and no formal system in place to teach one. The IBEW was founded to build exactly that system, and to fight for working conditions that today would be considered a basic human right, not a workplace perk.
The same climate, beyond the electrical trade
IBEW members weren't the direct victims of the two incidents that follow, those were coal miners and timber and dock workers, but they were organizing in the same era and the same basic climate: employers who could and did respond to organizing with force, and a legal system that offered workers no real protection from it. Understanding how far that violence went elsewhere in the labor movement helps explain why a legally protected right to organize took as long, and cost as much, as it did to win.
Private armies, hired by the employer
The year after the IBEW's founding, one of the era's defining confrontations showed just how far an employer would go to break a union. In 1892, Carnegie Steel's Henry Clay Frick locked out the workforce at the company's Homestead, Pennsylvania mill rather than accept the union's terms, and had a three-mile fence built around the plant with rifle slits cut into it at shoulder height. To force strikebreakers into the mill, Frick hired several hundred agents from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private security firm that functioned, in effect, as a corporation's personal army, and had them shipped up the Monongahela River on barges before dawn. Thousands of Homestead workers and their families met the barges at the riverbank. A gunfight broke out that lasted most of the day, leaving workers and Pinkerton agents dead on both sides before the Pinkertons surrendered and the Pennsylvania state militia was called in to retake the town for the company. Homestead didn't involve a state or local government's own forces the way Ludlow and Everett later would. It showed the alternative: an employer simply buying its own private force to do the job instead.
When strikes were met with rifles
The broader labor movement's fight for basic protections turned violent again and again in the decades that followed. The best-known case is the Ludlow Massacre of April 20, 1914, in southern Colorado. Roughly 10,000 coal miners employed by John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company had been on strike since September 1913 over low pay and unsafe conditions, and had been evicted from company housing into tent colonies as a result. The Colorado National Guard, initially sent in under the pretense of keeping peace, set up a machine gun on a ridge overlooking the largest of those colonies, at Ludlow, and on the morning of April 20 began firing into the tents below, an assault that continued off and on through most of the day.
The Guard's machine gun position on Water Tank Hill, overlooking the tent colony below
As darkness fell, Guardsmen moved through the colony and set the tents on fire. A Denver Express front page from nine days later reported coroner's jury testimony that the tents had been deliberately soaked with oil before they were set ablaze, under the headline "Militia Fired Tents Soaked With Oil, Coroner Is Told." Archaeological and historical research at the site has documented that at least two women and eleven children died suffocating in a pit dug beneath one tent, hiding from the gunfire when the fire above them spread.
One of the tent-cellar pits families had dug for shelter, photographed after the fire
Contemporary coverage, nine days after the massacre, reporting coroner's jury testimony on how the fire started
What was left of the Ludlow colony afterward
Estimates of the total dead that day range from about nineteen to twenty-five, depending on the source, but the method itself, a militia opening fire on an encampment of families and then burning it, is not in dispute. It remains one of the deadliest confrontations between an employer and its own workers in American history.
The Pacific Northwest's own Bloody Sunday
Closer to home, the deadliest single day in Northwest labor history happened just north of Seattle, and it followed a pattern of organized violence in the weeks before it, not a sudden, isolated outburst. The strike itself grew out of exactly the kind of conditions this history keeps returning to: shingle weavers fed cedar blocks into open, unguarded saw blades by hand all day, and lost fingers often enough that a mangled hand was practically a trade credential. Everett mill owners had cut wages during a downturn and never restored them once business recovered, and shingle weavers struck to get that pay back.
A shingle weaver's hands, the routine cost of the job the Everett strike was fought over
Through September and October 1916, Industrial Workers of the World members trying to speak on a traditional free-speech corner in Everett in support of that strike were repeatedly arrested and beaten by local police and deputies. On October 30, 1916, that escalated: more than 200 armed men deputized by Snohomish County Sheriff Donald McRae met a boatload of 41 IWW members at the dock, loaded them into cars and trucks, and drove them to a remote spot near the Beverly Park interurban station. There, deputies formed two lines and forced the men to run a gauntlet between them, beaten one by one with clubs, guns, and hoses as they passed.
The Wobblies came back anyway. On November 5, 1916, around 300 IWW members sailed from Seattle to Everett aboard the steamers Verona and Calista to try again. McRae's deputies, still over 200 strong, met the Verona at the dock and refused to let it land. No one has ever established who fired first, but the resulting gunfight left at least five IWW members and two deputies dead, with some accounts placing the toll as high as twelve, plus dozens more wounded. It became known as the Everett Massacre, and it happened on the same waters this company has served for years.
Mourners at the Seattle funeral held for the Everett Massacre victims
The law finally caught up
For decades, none of this violence was illegal on the employer's side, because there was no federal right to organize for a court to enforce. That changed on July 5, 1935, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, known as the Wagner Act, into law. For the first time, private-sector workers had a federally protected right to form unions, bargain collectively, and take collective action without being fired or blacklisted for it, enforced by a new National Labor Relations Board. It didn't undo Ludlow or Everett, but it meant the next generation of tradespeople wouldn't need a body count to win the same rights.
Local 46, a hundred-plus years running
Seattle's own IBEW local traces back to 1901, when Local 217 was chartered as the city's inside electrical workers' union. A national rift in the IBEW known as the Reid-Murphy split left Local 217 unaffiliated with the international union from 1909 to 1914, even though it kept functioning locally the whole time. In April 1914, it was reorganized and rechartered as IBEW Local 46, starting with about 250 members working as inside wiremen, marine wiremen, and radio and telephone workers around Seattle's shipyards and industrial waterfront. More than a century later, Local 46 represents over 4,500 members across King, Kitsap, Jefferson, and Clallam counties, and co-sponsors the apprenticeship program that trains the next generation of electricians in this area.
Why Hanco is a union shop
Our electricians are proud IBEW Local 46 members. That's not a small detail to us. The apprenticeship standards, safety training, and wages this trade now runs on exist because people organized for them, sometimes at real cost, going back to that boarding house in St. Louis in 1891. When you hire a union electrician, you're hiring someone who came up through a structured training program instead of picking up bad habits on the fly, and you're supporting the same standards that keep the whole trade safer for everyone in it.
Sources
- International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, "Our History & Museum," on the 1891 founding convention.
- Library of Congress, "International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers (IBEW)," on the union's founding and early structure.
- IBEW Local 223, "Our History," on early-era wages and industry death rates.
- IBEW Local 104, "History," on hourly wages, 12-hour/7-day schedules, and the Boston-area 50 percent death rate.
- Wikipedia, "Lineworker," on line work mortality rates between the 1890s and 1930s.
- h2g2/BBC, "The Accidental Electrocution of John Feeks: A Victim of the Current Wars," drawing on contemporary 1889 newspaper accounts.
- Wikimedia Commons, "John Feeks, Western Union lineman, killed by AC, October 11, 1889."
- AFL-CIO, "1892 Homestead Strike," on Frick's use of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
- Library of Congress, "1892 Homestead Strike," on the plant fence, the Pinkerton barges, and the state militia's role.
- Britannica, "Ludlow Massacre."
- National Park Service, "War in the Coalfields," on the Colorado Coalfield War and its aftermath.
- Colorado Coalfield War Archaeological Project, "History and Archaeology of the Ludlow Massacre," on the machine gun placement and the tent-cellar deaths, based on physical excavation of the site.
- PBS American Experience, "The Ludlow Massacre," from the Rockefellers documentary series.
- Denver Express, April 29, 1914 front page, digitized via the Digital Public Library of America, on coroner's jury testimony regarding the tent fire.
- Photos: Library of Congress, Bain News Service Collection ("Ruins Ludlow Colony — Trinidad, Col.," no known restrictions on publication); Denver Public Library / Digital Public Library of America (tent-cellar ruins and Water Tank Hill machine gun position); University of Washington Special Collections and Everett Public Library, via HistoryLink.org (shingle weaver injury and Everett Massacre funeral photos), used here for educational and historical purposes with credit to the holding institutions.
- HistoryLink.org, "Citizen deputies beat 41 IWW members at Everett's Beverly Park," on the October 30, 1916 gauntlet beating.
- HistoryLink.org, "Everett Massacre (1916)," the Washington state history encyclopedia's account of Bloody Sunday.
- University of Washington Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium, "Everett Massacre: Bloody Sunday, November 5, 1916."
- National Labor Relations Board, "1935 Passage of the Wagner Act."
- Archives West, "International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 46 records," and IBEW Local 46, "History: 1901-1914," on the Local 217 to Local 46 transition.
This is general educational information intended to build foundational understanding, not a substitute for a historian's or labor archive's detailed account. Casualty figures for events over a century old vary by source, as noted above.
You're welcome to quote this article elsewhere with attribution and a link back to the original at hancoelectric.com.