West Coast Teamster Career
After the war ended, Beck returned to Seattle and his job as a laundry truck driver. He became an organizer with the Teamsters. He successfully convinced hotels to contract only with unionized laundry services, which led laundry companies to unionize to win business. His subsequent rise in the Teamsters was quick: He was elected to the executive board of Local 566 in 1920, president of Joint Council 28 (which covered Seattle) in 1923, secretary-treasurer of Local 566 in 1925, and president of Local 566 in 1927. The same year he was elected president of his local, he was hired by the international union as a full-time organizer.
In 1937, Beck formed the Western Conference of Teamsters as a means of counteracting the conservative leadership of Joint Councils in San Francisco. Beck persuaded Teamsters president Daniel J. Tobin that the Western Conference of Teamsters was no threat to the power and authority of the international union. Harry Bridges, leader of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), had led a successful four-day strike in 1934. Bridges was now leading "the march inland"—an attempt to organize warehouse workers away from shipping ports. Beck was alarmed by Bridges' radical politics and worried that the ILA would encroach on Teamster jurisdictions. But Teamster joint councils in Los Angeles and other California ports seemed unconcerned. As an end run around the complacent joint councils, Beck formed a large regional organization. Beck engaged in fierce organizing battles and membership raids against the ILA, effectively stifling the "march inland." The Western Conference of Teamsters, and Beck, emerged significantly stronger from these battles.
Read more about this topic: Dave Beck
Famous quotes containing the words west, coast and/or career:
“Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)