IBEW 1837 Labor Rep Matt Beck Retiring
Matt Beck, labor representative for IBEW Local 1837, is retiring this week after 17 years on staff at the union. Beck previously worked for nearly 20 years as a TV director at WGME Channel 13 in Portland, before being hired on at the local, which represents 1,600 workers primarily at electric utilities and broadcasting in Maine and New Hampshire. Known affectionately as “Bro Beck,” Matt holds a special place in our hearts as a passionate organizer and advocate in the labor movement. But he says he isn’t going too far.
“I’m not going to be an organizer and business rep for the local anymore, but I’ll still remain active,” said Beck. “My wife and I plan to do a little bit of traveling and I’ll be able to have some flexibility to go hiking during the week, not just on weekends. But if there’s an organizing campaign and they need extra hands or boots on the ground I’m always delighted to do that.”
Originally from New York, Matt Beck grew up in a staunch union household. His father was a member of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians and started his career as a sound effects man on such old time programs as the Shadow and the Lone Ranger during the golden age of radio. When TV shows replaced radio dramas, he became an audio engineer, first with CBS Radio and then with WOR in New York.
“I remembered as a kid watching him and helping him paint picket signs when they were going on strike and he helped lead the membership there in at least a couple of strikes,” Beck recalled.
When Beck came of age in the 1970s, his father initially tried to discourage from going into radio broadcasting because he believed it was a “dying industry,” even back then. But Beck had fallen in love with the work. While in college at the State University of New York at Binghamton, he admittedly spent more of his time at the college radio station than he did at the library. After graduation, he worked briefly at a couple of radio stations before taking a job first at a local public television station, and then at a CBS affiliate where he learned to become a director. Then one day, a friend called him with a job offer at WGME in Portland, Maine.
Soon, he and his fiancé were on the road with all of their belongings to make a new life in the Pine Tree state.
“It was kind of surreal because I went from a non-union station in Binghamton to a unionized station in Maine,” Beck recalled. “A coworker and I had talked about trying to organize a union back in Binghamton, but some of the old guard guys were so scared and against it that we never got that much traction. I went from a non-union station to a union station and my salary more than doubled when I moved here.”
Eventually, he became an IBEW chief steward and led WGME’s 50 members during some very challenging times. While the workers had a very good contract when he arrived there, by 2005, the station's owner Sinclair was trying to break the union.
“They were making a contract offer that wasn’t that terrible overall, but it was contingent on us giving up our security clause,” said Beck. “I explained to the members, ‘They’re trying to break our union. We can’t do this.’ Our members were pretty determined to do what we needed to do to get them to drop that demand and eventually they did.”
But it was a tough struggle. Beck soon learned what it meant to have the support of the broader labor movement as other union members turned out on the picket line to support the WGME workers.
“Suddenly, all these really cool people started showing up to help us. People I had never met like Doug Born, Peter Kellman and Mike Sylvester,” said Beck. “I then started going to labor council meetings and learning about the broader labor movement.”
After the 2005 fight, Beck was ready to move on to a different job. That's when IBEW 1837 stepped in and offered him a position as an organizer.
"My kids were young at that point and they thought ‘oh, dad’s giving up a really cool job” to do something that they didn’t fully understand," he said. "But as they got older they realized that what I was doing was much cooler than what I was doing in broadcasting.”
Beck also made sure that his children helped him paint picket signs and attended union events just like he did with his father so many years before.
“I wanted them to have that same memory that I had as a kid,” he said.
Beating Back Right to Work in Maine & New Hampshire
Then in 2010, Republicans swept to power in the midterm elections and anti-labor politicians took the governor’s office in Maine and both houses of the legislatures in Maine and New Hampshire. Immediately they set their eyes on passing “right-to-work” for less legislation to weaken the power of unions. Up in Maine, the Maine AFL-CIO and our members flooded the State House and managed to beat back this destructive legislation.
In New Hampshire, Governor John Lynch opposed right-to-work, but there was an anti-labor supermajority in the Legislature, which was more than enough to override his veto. Union members got organized, called their legislators and set up camp in the New Hampshire State House to make sure enough pro-labor legislators were in the room to sustain the veto when it came up for a vote. They had managed to convince eight Republican legislators to oppose right to work, but they also knew that rabidly anti-union House Speaker William O’Brien could bring up the vote anytime if he knew he had enough anti-labor representatives in the chamber.
Beck and AFL-CIO field rep Dan Justice helped set up a war room in an office building across the street to track legislators and make sure their votes were all accounted for. Union members were in the halls keeping track of where pro-labor voters were at all times. If a legislator went to the bathroom or out for a smoke, they kept tabs on them and were ready to send a runner out after them if the right to work vote was called. All of this information was reported back to Beck and Justice.
“If someone said ‘I’ve got to leave and pick my kid up at soccer practice,’ we’d say, ‘No, stay here. We’ll send somebody to pick your kid up.’”
NH workers kept up this system for the entire legislative session.
“Speaker O’Brien was also counting votes but he ran out of time. When they finally had the override vote, we knew exactly what the tally was going to be,” said Beck. “We activated our members to contact their legislators and we called every member of the House, Republican and Democrat. We identified everybody and we made sure our people were there every day that they were in session.”
A New Era
When Beck arrived at WGME in 1987, his coworkers were strongly pro-union and many had come from union families. But as more members retired and overall union density declined in the 1980s and 90s, Beck noticed that fewer and fewer younger workers really understood the value of unions and the labor movement. It could be a challenge to educate members about the importance of collective action as they had not grown up in a union culture. But that’s now changing, he says.
“I’ve got to say, one of the things I’ve seen in the last few years is that younger folks coming in seem to be much more in tune and supportive of unions than they were 20 years ago,” said Beck. “They immediately get it.”
In late 2021, WGME workers voted unanimously to authorize a strike after years of struggling with low wages. When Beck and his negotiating team took the extra stop of having a one-on-one conversation with each member, nearly all of them said without hesitation that they were ready to go out.
He says he’s always valued an organizing model that entails getting as many members involved in the union as possible. This strategy is in contrast to the service model some leaders support — where unions are treated as some kind of insurance that you purchase. Beck says workers really need to take ownership of their union and participate to make it strong.
“There are some people who take the job and the union is already in place. They’ve got a mature contract with really good wages, good benefits and working conditions,” he said. “These folks may not recognize that we’re standing on the shoulders of everybody who came before us and that the reason we have a good contract is because people in the past did the hard work to negotiate and were ready to take a stand if necessary.”
Beck says it’s been a “dream come true” to have been able to represent his fellow union brothers and sisters and help them fight for their common interests. But there have been heartbreaks over the years.
“When you have a union organizing campaign with 150 people and you lose it by five votes, it hurts you personally, but you also feel pain for the worker,” he said. “You just feel like, ‘oh, I let these people down. What could I have done to get those extra five votes?’”
But Beck always goes back to what his union brother Steve Smith always says: "I haven’t lost any organizing campaigns. There are just some I haven’t won yet.”
While Beck says he’s been fortunate to meet incredible people like the late AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, Flight Attendants union leader Sarah Nelson and the late great Barbara Ehrenreich, the ones he most fondly remembers are the workers who have fearlessly risked their livelihood to fight for what is right.
Recently a man whom Beck had counseled ten years ago about forming a union reached out to him to let him know he had since joined a union.
“He sent me a text saying, ‘Hey, I’m a steward now and I’m on the negotiating committee! Isn’t that cool?’” said Beck. “I was like ‘right on!’ It’s been a great ride. This job has been a real gift. I’m ready for the next chapter, but I don’t regret anything I’ve done in this job.”