LABOR: The Fringe on Top

Dave Beck, the ruddy-faced president of the A.F.L. Teamster Union, could easily be mistaken for a millionaire. Teamster Beck has several personal business interests on the side: he owns large chunks of Seattle real estate; he is board chairman of Kellerblock Corp., which owns Seattle’s 18-story Grosvenor House apartments, and, until recently, he operated Northwest Securities Corp., an auto finance company. His family has interests in other enterprises, including beer and beverage distributorships. Last week it appeared that Beck put over one of his best business deals at the union’s expense.

Plus Periodic Rest. From the Teamsters President Beck gets the same salary as doddering President Emeritus Dan Tobin, who retired in 1952: $50,000 a year.* He also gets some plain and fancy fringe benefits, including the right to travel at union expense anywhere in the world with his family and aides for “periodic rests”—a privilege specifically written into the Teamsters’ constitution.

Recently, Teamster officials decided that their boss deserved the same sort of generous treatment granted to retired President Tobin, for whom the union provides homes in Miami and New England, along with servants and upkeep. Last March 10, while Beck discreetly absented himself from the room, the union executive board unanimously voted to supply him with a “home and operating help.” It turned out that Beck, always a good businessman, did even better than Tobin. He sold his own house to the union for $163,215, pocketed the money and went right on living there, free.

Plus a Waterfall. Last week, when the story of his latest and flashiest fringe benefit broke, Beck bellowed like a bull caught in the barn door. “I had nothing to do with the purchase,” he said. “When they wanted to give me a home, I wanted nothing less than what I was living in already. They said, ‘Go ahead and buy it. We don’t care what it costs.’ “

Teamster Beck, who built the rambling brick residence on Seattle’s exclusive Shore Drive some five years ago, insisted that the union was getting its money’s worth. The house has three bedrooms and three baths on one floor, two two-car garages, a separate four-room apartment, a movie room with seats for 50 and two theater-sized projectors, a bathhouse, a heated tile swimming pool covering 1,000 square feet, and an ornamental stream with artificial rock waterfall, illuminated at night. Dave Beck feels that it is just the kind of place a labor leader should have. Said he: “The labor movement has to pay its top executives what business would pay in similar positions.”

* Other toppers on the U.S. labor movement’s wage scale: the Railway Clerks’ George Harrison, $60,000 a year; the United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis, $50,000; the Musicians’ James Petrillo, $46,000; the Steelworkers’ Dave McDonald, $40,000; A.F.L. President George Meany, $35,000; the United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther (who gets no salary as president of the C.I.O.) $18,000.