Frank Emspak

1943 - 2024

Frank Emspak

MADISON - At the University of Wisconsin Health University Hospital, a patient in the hematology-oncology ward spoke with the nurses in the wee hours of the morning. He was telling them why they could and should demand more from their union; they would need to organize to do that.

That man was Frank Emspak, who spent the last days of his life doing what he loved – organizing working people to better their lives. He died on June 15, 2024, at the age of 80, from acute myeloid leukemia. He had spent some 65 years as an activist, organizer, labor leader and media executive. Emspak lived by the principle that working-class people must be central in any discussion of organizing society and our lives; there could be no compromise on that.

Emspak was born in 1943 to a family already active in the labor movement. His father, Julius, was a co-founder and first secretary-treasurer of the United Electrical and Machine Workers (UE), during its rapid rise in the 1930s and its near-destruction in the 1950s. His mother Stella (nee Abrams) was also an activist in the UE. His paternal grandparents were free-thinkers who were forced to leave the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the U.S. in the wake of failed uprisings and unrest. Stella's side of the family had to leave Russia after the first Russian Revolution of 1905. One part of the Abrams family settled in Galveston, TX, and the other in Holyoke, MA. It was in Galveston that Stella heard a radical organizer describe a vision of a new society that inspired her; she moved to New York City by herself, a 17-year-old who arrived just in time for the Wall Street Crash that ushered in the Depression. She took on secretarial jobs, before landing at the UE.

The Emspak family located themselves in Schenectady, NY, the home of General Electric. Frank's grandfather, also named Frank (Ferenc in Hungarian), and his three sons became skilled workers at GE. His grandmother too, would work there occasionally as a cleaner. Frank, the older of Julius and Stella's two sons, would do so in turn, becoming a machinist, though not before a detour into the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s.

His first conflicts with authority came while growing up in Yonkers, NY. Emspak and his classmates were asked who their parents would vote for in the 1952 presidential election. Most answered Eisenhower; a few might have said Adlai Stevenson. Frank said his parents were voting for Vincent Hallinan, the Progressive Party candidate. As he notes in his memoir, "Troublemaker: Saying No To Power" the principal of the school came out to lecture the students about communism, but after a short "discussion" with his parents and the school administrators, the principal apologized. While at Roosevelt High School, Emspak joined a march by the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. When the School authorities discovered this (it was on the front page of the New York Times) he was promptly expelled – though after another parental confrontation the expulsion was rescinded. During the same period, he picketed Woolworths for its discriminatory policies in New York City.

However, it was while attending the University of Wisconsin that Emspak's political activism began to make a bigger impact. He organized some of the first student groups to oppose the Vietnam War, at a time when a majority of U.S. citizens still supported it. In August of 1965 Emspak became chairman of the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the organization led the first nationwide protests against the war. He also was a precinct coordinator for a referendum in Madison that called for immediate troop withdrawal; 45% of the voters were in favor.

His parents, especially his father, wanted him to go into the sciences. They worried their children would suffer from the same repression they did. But Emspak wasn't able to stay out of politics; he took after his father too strongly.

It was at Wisconsin that he had his first contacts with the labor movement. In 1963, he went on a reporting trip to Hazard County, KY, to interview striking miners and bring them food supplies. That same year, he and his friend Michael Eisenscher started to organize the student employees. As in high school, Emspak was threatened with expulsion. The university didn't follow through on the threat, the student workers won a wage increase, and Emspak gained an appreciation for organizing that included reaching out to like-minded unions. While at UW Madison he married Dolores Fox, whom he had met in the late 1950s in discussion groups organized by leftist parents for their children.

After graduating with a degree in Zoology from UW Madison, Emspak continued to work with anti-war organizations. He started graduate school in 1967, working towards a PhD in American History. It was about this time that he was involved in a protest against the Dow Chemical company's recruitment on the UW campus; the company was a manufacturer of napalm. Emspak also attended Madison Area Technical College and learned the machinist trade; this would be a defining feature of his working life for many years.

Having been awarded a Ford Fellowship in history Frank was able to accompany Dolores to Paris - now with their first child, Jesse, in tow. Dolores continued her studies of French literature and Frank was able to build contacts with local Left activists and organizations while writing his own dissertation.

On their return to the U.S., armed with a PhD in history and as a result of Dolores' decision to pursue medical school, Emspak moved to the Boston area, their family now included a daughter, Freya. They resided in Dorchester, Salem, and finally Lynn. The North Shore of Massachusetts was where he became a leader in the local labor movement.

In 1972, Emspak became a machinist at the now-defunct United Shoe Machine Corp. in Beverly, Massachusetts. Over the course of three years he developed his machinist's skills, which he saw as integral to being an effective organizer and union member. He rose from shop steward to executive board member for local 271 of the UE, representing the workers at the plant. It was there he learned important lessons about the particular cultures of working people in the mill town factories in Massachusetts. Emspak also developed his political thinking as a member of both the union and the Communist Party; he eventually concluded the Party was ill-equipped to deal with changes in the workforce and workplace, or be an effective force for advancing the interests of workers.

After his stint at USM, he went to work at General Electric, at Local 201 in the Wilmington plant. Emspak was one of the most highly educated workers there - nobody had a PhD; and that at first would set him apart from others. Emspak made his first connections as best he knew how: when he was appointed to the Health and Safety Committee, he took the job seriously, using his education to benefit the people he worked with. That earned him the respect of his work mates.

In Wilmington, as at the USM, he became a shop steward and successfully ran for a position on the union's Wilmington plant executive board. Emspak demonstrated his militancy and his negotiating skills when in 1979, the plant went on strike over sexist hiring and promotion practices at GE. That strike happened because of a lawsuit originally filed in 1944, asking for equal pay for women workers in the wartime plant. GE had ignored the verdict - but the strike changed that. Women received back pay, some dating back decades. Jobs were reclassified to ensure that both men and women were paid equally for the same work.

A commitment to feminism in the ideological sense wasn't what drove him, he said. It was that women in his family worked; the "traditional" family that many associate with the 1950s simply wasn't economically feasible for working people. "My grandmother worked, my mother worked, Stella's mother was a garment worker," he said. "These women were workers. It was just the way it was." Since they were workers, they should be treated fairly. That sense of justice - and pragmatism - also meant he was willing to support his wife Dolores in her efforts to become a doctor. "She was willing to support me in being some kind of revolutionary," he said. "It seemed only fair that I support her going to med school."

Emspak stayed at GE until 1987. The local continued to clash with the company; this time over the introduction of new manufacturing technologies. In those years he ran for assistant business agent twice; the first time losing by a narrow margin of only a few dozen votes out of thousands; the second time more substantially. The problem, as he saw it, was that there was no vision for protecting employment from the left wing of the union, even though the same Left activists had made what would now be considered unheard-of gains in union membership and outreach in the Wilmington plant.

Emspak would not remain in Wilmington; with the change in his own economic circumstances - his wife Dolores was a practicing physician by the end of 1983 - he felt he could no longer effectively represent other workers when a strike, for example, would not affect him the same way. It was, he said, time to go.

Taking a leave of absence from his job in Wilmington, in 1987, he went to work in the administration of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis for the state's Center for Applied Technology, where he stayed until 1991. It was there he attempted to offer a vision of technological change that, rather than removing skilled workers or reducing skills of those that remained, would enhance them, taking advantage of the tacit knowledge that many workers bring to their jobs. He was particularly proud of the success with the Pneumatic Scale Company, which he said showed the possibility of incorporating new technology while still maintaining employment. It was, for Emspak, a way to use his intellectual skills and background to make life better for workers and give them a say in the way technology was built and used. Emspak left when Dukakis left office; the Republican governor who followed, Bill Weld, was indifferent if not actively hostile to the vision CAT represented.

In 1991, he applied to work at the School for Workers in Madison, WI, and started another chapter of his life. The first years were hard, as he was effectively commuting between Madison and Boston. By 1998, Dolores had moved permanently to Madison, and the couple moved to the house at 916 Castle Place, on the shores of Lake Mendota.

It was during this period Emspak was a member of the International Federation for Automatic Control, a multinational engineering organization of scientific societies that studies automation and studies the social effects of technology implementation; he became vice chair of their social effects committee. He also was a fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

In Madison, Emspak recognized that it was important that unions have a voice in the mass media; there was essentially no input from labor on any of the major issues of the day as reported in the local or national outlets. The result was the birth of Workers Independent News.

Workers Independent News was to be a source of content for radio stations, taking advantage of new digital production tools. It would be financed by the labor movement just as Fox News or right-wing talk radio is funded by the billionaire class and foundations. For a decade, Emspak was tireless in his efforts to raise funds and build a stable and viable news organization. Eventually the labor unions curtailed their support – some unions were even opposed to his efforts – and WIN was forced to close.

Even after the demise of WIN, Emspak kept on organizing – he made time once a week to speak to younger people, offering strategic advice.

Emspak always had a strong intellectual curiosity; his home was filled with books about labor, but also about nature, or science, or cultures he was interested in. That intellectual curiosity would define much of his life. To be a skilled worker, he said, one has to be curious enough to want to know how things work. "My parents, my uncles, were skilled people," he said. "They made things. I think that's part of it." He was an avid gardener his whole life; as well as an amateur bird watcher. Though he knew he was dying he was happy to see the tulips he planted the year before bloom this spring.

Emspak is survived by his wife; his son Jesse; his daughter Freya; and his grandchildren: Dexter Frank Gordon and Simon Gordon.

The family would like to thank Dr. Gahvari and nurse Katie of the Hematology Oncology Unit, all the nurses and staff at the Infusion Center, University of Wisconsin Hospital, and the Hospice staff at Oakwood Village West.

Memorial services will be held July 1 , 2024, at Olbrich Gardens at 3330 Atwood Ave., Madison, WI, from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.