May 5, 1907: Cable Car Workers Walk Off-work

May 5 1907, over 1,500 workers from the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America (commonly known as the Carmen’s Union) voted to strike and walked off work demanding $3 per day and an 8-hour work day, grinding the city to a halt.

On day one the Carmen’s Union strike left most of streetcar companies; United Railroads, the California Street Railway Company, the Geary Street Railway Company, and the Park and Ocean Railroad, without any operating cable cars, filling the streets with horse-drawn carriages.

Two days into the strike, two workers were murdered by scabs who were armed and deputized by the police after a strikers raided a streetcar station where scabs were loading onto cars. May 7 became known as “Bloody Tuesday.”

Streetcar workers joined over 10,000 other workers on strike; metal workers, laundry workers and telephone operators had begun strikes in the previous days and months. Militant unionists passed handbills around the city urging more workers to “Tie Up The Town.”

Throughout the strike, workers sabotaged the cable car tracks in Daly City, the Mission, and Ocean View. Boycotts, scabbing, violent confrontations, various acts of sabotage, and small riots characterized the remainder of the strike, which lasted until March of 1908.

The strike most famously helped produce what we now know as MUNI, the countries first municipally owned rail system, a transit system “for the people, by the people,” by pushing demands for the public ownership of rail. The bond measure for its construction passed in Dec. 1909.