Everett Labor Leaders Organize Bellingham Trades
Local union activists Jim Ballew and Dave Watt travel to Bellingham to help workers there establish their own Building Trades Council.
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Jim Ballew and Dave Watt, of the Plasterer's union, have just returned from Bellingham, where they have been working for the past three weeks. They left behind them something that Bellingham unionists had not previously known, in the shape of a full-fledged Building Trades Council. Thoroughly familiar with the workings of the local council, they assisted the Bellingham Building Trades to organize along similar lines. The plasterers, carpenters, lathers, plumbers, electricians, hoisting engineers, and structural iron workers formed the new body.
“He is a man who 'lets not his right hand know what his left hand doeth,' or in other words does not parade his activity before the public, but in his quiet efficient way, he gets results.”
This highlights the cross-city solidarity and regional organization work that defined the early 20th-century labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. The success of Everett's union structures served as a template for other rapidly industrializing cities in the region.
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