Noel Beasley, Workers United President

Noel Beasley is the president of Workers United and the manager of its Chicago and Midwest Regional Joint Board, which represents 20,000 members in seven states in the upper Midwest. He also is an SEIU vice president, a post he has held since 2009.

He has been a member of the union for thirty-seven years. Beasley started his career as a member when he joined the Textile Workers Union in 1974, while working as a welder at an Indiana factory. He joined the union's staff in 1977 and has served as director of its Midwest operations for twenty-five years. Beasley has a strong track record of successful campaigns to save jobs and improve the lives of working people. Two of the union's biggest recent campaigns were waged in Beasley's region.

Chicago-based Hartmarx, the largest menswear manufacturing company in the nation, filed for bankruptcy protection after U.S. banks curtailed its lines of credit. The clothing maker employs 3,500 across the U.S. and Canada, with about 1,000 of its employees located in Rock Island and suburban Des Plaines, IL, where suits for President Obama are made. The successful Workers United campaign to save the company included sit ins and demonstrations to demand that big banks restructure the company's debt to save jobs.

Hugo Boss, the last clothing manufacturer in Cleveland, planned to shut its plant and lay off 400 workers in 2010. Hugo Boss planned to save money by shipping the jobs overseas to Turkey or Eastern Europe. Workers United launched a massive campaign to save the plant and the jobs, enlisting the support of influential people like then-Governor Ted Strickland and actor and activist Danny Glover. The jobs were saved and the plant operates today.

Beasley has been on the Board of Directors of the Amalgamated Bank since the early 1990s and has been chair of the Bank's Trust Committee for fifteen years. He became the chair of the Bank's Board of Directors in 2011. He serves as a trustee of a number of pension and health and welfare funds and is on the Board of Directors of the Amalgamated Life Insurance Company.

Beasley received a B.A. from Pepperdine College in 1966 and an M.A. from Purdue University in 1968.