More than 1,500 IBEW members who work for San Diego Gas and Electric are claiming victory — and breathing a little easier — after the San Diego City Council unanimously voted in June to squash a citizens’ initiative to force the municipal government to take over operation of the utility’s operations within the city’s limits.
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| Local 465 Business Manager Nate Fairman says "we'll be ready" for any future threats to IBEW jobs.
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“This was Union Busting 101,” said Nate Fairman, business manager of San Diego Local 465, which has represented SDG&E workers for more than 100 years.
If the municipalization effort had been successful, he said, it would have put hundreds of IBEW jobs at risk, jeopardized the pay and benefits of those left behind, and harmed the local’s bargaining power.
“The takeover would have gutted our century-old contract with SDG&E and hurt my members’ ability to provide for their families,” Fairman said. “It was just reckless.”
The defeat of the Power San Diego municipalization campaign was largely thanks to the work of Local 465 and other members of Responsible Energy San Diego, an alliance of labor unions, economic organizations and businesses.
What also helped was the work IBEW members across San Diego put in over the last 10 years to help elect a solid pro-worker majority to the City Council, a body that for too long had an anti-worker track record.
“Our activism won out,” Fairman said. “Our members showed up to every meeting [about municipalization] with the mayor and City Council, and we fought hard to ensure that the frontline workers’ concerns were front and center.”
Conversations surrounding SDG&E’s municipalization began in earnest several years ago when the City Council was in negotiations with the utility to renew its franchise agreement.
“The biggest misconception was that the city takeover would lead to lower rates, but it’s not that simple,” Fairman said.
One study found that buying SDG&E to municipalize it could cost San Diegans as much as $9.3 billion in bond-backed startup and purchasing costs, $3.9 billion in lost revenue from property taxes and franchise fees, and as much as $400 million in annual interest payments.
“This debt would be 100% funded through our electric bills and would mean higher costs for all of us,” Fairman said.
Far more worrying, he said, was how the IBEW would fit into a municipalization picture. “The city taking over SDG&E would have destroyed our union contract,” Fairman said.
PSD’s backers claimed that their proposal included protections for IBEW-represented workers. “There was only one sentence mentioning union labor,” Fairman noted. When the PSD plan was drafted, he said, “they didn’t reach out to us.”
When PSD launched a full-blown effort last fall to force the government takeover plan onto the November 2024 election ballot, Local 465 and the rest of RESD were ready to spend the next months building support for their side.
“Coalition building and solidarity in the San Diego labor movement were crucial,” Fairman said. “Bob Dean at [Vacaville, Calif.] Local 1245 also helped us tremendously; they’ve been fighting similar efforts up in San Francisco.”
SDG&E backed the IBEW’s efforts as well, something Fairman credits to the union’s Code of Excellence program. “Working together, we spent a year developing the Code,” he said. “Now we have Code stickers on all the trucks. Our partnership within the framework of the Code was crucial to delivering this victory.”
The first big win came in April when the council’s Rules Committee reviewed proposed measures for November’s ballot. Dozens of IBEW members and their allies were on hand at the hearing, many wearing hardhats and carrying signs, to register their opposition. “We mobilized dozens of members to go to meetings to make our voices heard,” Fairman said.
After the Rules Committee voted against allowing the ballot measure to proceed, PSD tried launching a petition campaign to get the issue onto the ballot. The drive netted a fraction of the required number of valid signatures, but enough were collected to require the full City Council to consider the ballot question again.
At the council’s June meeting, a force of IBEW members was present again to testify against the proposal. “That vote was the biggest showdown,” Fairman said.
The council voted unanimously to reject the measure. “The frontline union workers’ voices carried the day,” Fairman said. “We got a crucial win by clearly laying out the risks to utility workers and to the city.”
The victory in San Diego was the latest among similar IBEW accomplishments. Last year, members of Manchester, Maine, Local 1837 led a successful statewide fight against a referendum that proposed allowing the state government to buy Central Maine Power and Versant Power, and the members of El Paso, Texas, Local 960 worked to defeat a ballot measure that could have led to a city takeover of El Paso Electric. Both plans also would have jeopardized hundreds of IBEW jobs.
Fairman said the San Diego municipalization plan may not be dead. “We now have a strong group of member activists ready to take on anything thrown our way,” he said. “If this or any other attack comes up again, we’ll be ready for it.”
Ninth District International Vice President Dave Reaves appreciated Local 465’s work. “Thanks to our members’ strong relationships with city leaders and our partnership with SDG&E, we were able to count on them to stick with us to help put down this expensive and ill-conceived attack on working people,” Reaves said.