Emspak, Frank

EMSPAK, FRANK (1943-2024). A leftwing organizer for more than a half century and a founder of labor radio, Emspak occupied a prominent place among the “Red Diaper Babies” or children of the Left who played major roles in the 1960s and the decades that followed.

Born in Yonkers, New York, Frank Emspak was the son of Julius Emspak, a key leader in the United Electrical Workers (UE) in the 1930s-1940s. The industrial union with the largest percentage and overall number of women members during the 1940s, the UE survived membership raids during the Cold War and remains the most leftwing union today. The expulsion of the UE from the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1949 and the imprisonment of Julius Emspak in 1952 for Contempt of Congress shaped his son’s young years.

Frank Emspak grew up in Yonkers, a heavily ethnic town losing its historic working-class character amidst vanishing industries. He managed several sports teams at Roosevelt High School and became an occasional sports stringer for the New York Times. Active in Student SANE, closely in touch with other red diaper babies, Emspak was briefly expelled from high school for political protest. Fellow teen-age activist Dolores Fox later became his spouse and lifelong political companion. Having quietly joining the Communist Party in the mid-1960s, Emspak served its labor sector but remained outside party activities proper for twenty years.

Accepted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Emspak planned a career in science before advancing to a doctoral program in American history. As an undergraduate, he became a leading figure in a briefly promising movement, the National Committee to End the War in Vietnam (NCEWV), which floundered on divisions within the rising antiwar movement. Along with others in his circle of graduate students in Madison, he helped organize a local antiwar referendum in 1969 and, after losing by a close vote, succeeded the following year. Emspak also played a prominent role, during 1970-1971, in the formation of a Teaching Assistants Association union and in the student strike that established the program in Black Studies on campus.

After a year in Paris, 1971-1972, while Dolores pursued research for a doctorate in French and Frank participated in the expatriate antiwar movement, the couple returned to the US. They moved first to Greater Boston, and Frank worked as a laboratory technician at Brigham Hospital, while Dolores, in a career shift, pursued a medical degree. Frank became a machinist in 1972 first at United Shoe Machinery Company in Beverly, Massachusetts. Emspak tried to re-energize the union while the company itself failed. He then moved over to the giant General Electric plant whose workers had cast off the UE for the less militant International Union of Electric Workers a generation earlier. There, he quickly settled in as a militant shop leader.

Over the next fifteen years, Emspak emerged as an important figure in New England’s labor movement, speaking widely for internal reform of unions while addressing the decline of many sectors of the industry. He worked for a time in the Commerce Department of Massachusetts, in the Center for Applied Technology, hoping to influence the AFL-CIO on grappling with these fateful shifts in manufacturing.

In 1991, Emspak returned to Madison, Wisconsin. He learned, to his surprise, that the School for Workers in Madison, long a Cold War bastion in the labor movement, offered him a position. He became a leading mobilizer, strategist and tactician for Dane County unionists.
In 1995, Emspak, with other Madison activists, launched Madison Labor Radio on the listener-sponsored radio station WORT-FM and staffed a thirty-minute weekly slot. This project led him and others to form Workers Independent News (WIN) in 2002, a service providing labor coverage that any radio station could tap, free of charge. At its peak, WIN reached as many as one million listeners and reported on various labor issues, such as strikes, safety, union organizing, and relevant political matters. The service lasted until 2017.

Ever workmanlike, Frank Emspak remained an important source of insight for unions until the end of his life, a source of support and strategic influence on progressive groups in Madison and throughout Wisconsin.

Frank Emspak, Troublemaker: Saying No To Power. Madison, WI: privately published, 2022.