Frank Emspak was an advocate for workers—and for labor media

The veteran labor activist, scholar, and journalist died on June 15, leaving behind a formidable legacy in Madison and beyond.

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The labor community in Madison and beyond is mourning the passing of Frank Emspak, a labor leader, organizer, advocate, mentor, and troublemaker. 

Emspak had a profound impact on Madison’s labor movement and on the U.S. labor movement, playing a leading role in the student peace movement during the Vietnam War, organizing student workers at UW-Madison and machinists in Massachusetts, and, years later, building a labor media network across the country. Emspak was compassionate, resolute, pragmatic, and funny. 

He was a generous mentor, offering younger workers support and counsel—including to nurses at the oncology ward at UW Health in the weeks before he died, on June 14, at the age of 80.

Much of Emspak’s work as an organizer and writer focused on the intersection of labor and technology—he believed that as skilled experts in their craft, workers should also have autonomy on the work site and control over the conditions of production. Emspak envisioned a future where technological advancement wouldn’t displace workers or force them into rote and de-skilled positions. He brought that vision to the state of Massachusetts’ Center for Applied Technology and to the International Federation of Automatic Control, where he studied the social impacts of technological change. 

From 1972 until 1987, Emspak worked as a machinist—first at United Shoe Machine Corp., in Beverly, Massachusetts, and beginning in 1976, at a General Electric plant in Wilmington. At GE, he and his union brothers and sisters fought the company over sexist policies that suppressed women’s wages and re-energized their union, IUE Local 201, in the process.

Emspak was a leftist from an important family of leftists: his father, Julius Emspak, founded United Electrical and Machine Workers (UE) and faced steep repression as a labor leader at the peak of McCarthyism. 

He met his wife, Dolores, early in his life—at a discussion group for children organized by their leftist parents. They married in 1964. Dolores Emspak studied French literature and later decided to pursue a career as a gynecologist. Frank supported her in her path.

Emspak was also a journalist. In 1998, he co-founded Madison Labor Radio, a labor news program on WORT 89.9 FM. The all-volunteer effort has operated for over 25 years as a broadcast focused on the issues and concerns of working people. Emspak produced Madison Labor Radio from its founding to his death, joined by the co-founder and co-producer Ellen LaLuzerne until her passing in 2023. 

Emspak also produced the Workers Independent News, or WIN, a service that launched in February 2002 and operated until November 2017. At its zenith, the program was broadcast on approximately seventy community stations. WIN, Madison Labor Radio and Frank himself provided in-depth national coverage and analysis of the 2011 uprising against Act 10, which stripped collective bargaining rights from most public sector workers in Wisconsin. 

Emspak was a regular contributor to a variety of other alternative news sources across the US, including Tone Madison, where he provided reportage and analysis of labor issues in Madison and across Wisconsin. 

In 2022, Emspak published a memoir, which chronicles his remarkable life. Troublemaker: Saying No To Power can also be read as an organizing manual for new generations of worker organizers. You can hear Frank describe his memoir in two hour-long conversations on WORT (Part one can be found here, and part two, here).

A detailed obituary is available at the Wisconsin State Journal, and other publications have already paid tribute: The Progressive has a remembrance from Paul Buhle, a noted author and close friend of Emspak’s, and The Capital Times has published a remembrance from John Nichols. Members of Madison Labor Radio memorialized Emspak on their June 21 broadcast.  

And earlier this year, on February 2, 2024 – just after the 25th anniversary of Madison Labor Radio’s first broadcast—the City of Madison recognized Frank Emspak Day and Madison Labor Radio Day. WORT took that as an opportunity to recognize Emspak for what he was: the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) hero of the working class. 

Below, please read about Frank Emspak in his own words, which we excerpted from his memoir, Troublemaker:

On a warm night in June 1984, my coworkers and I stood around waiting for the final union membership vote on GE’s vision for manufacturing—the “Factory of the Future.” The Factory of the Future was a new manufacturing plant for aircraft parts, to be located in West Lynn at the site of the soon-to-be-shuttered West Lynn GE Factory. GE touted the investment as a vote of confidence in an old unionized location, while at the same time threatening to place the investment elsewhere if the union local did not comply with its vision. 

GE’s Factory of the Future, with its twelve-hour-days and seven-day weeks required a change in the definition of the standard work day, defined in the national contract as eight hours and the standard work week of five days. The new schedule required by the company meant that one was not paid overtime after eight hours. The new work schedule would also change the way vacation and holidays were calculated. 

The company had the enthusiastic support of the International Union (IUE), the District and most of the local leadership in implementing the new vision for the plant. Local media and all the politicians supported GE and suggested those of us who opposed the company’s retrograde vision were putting the very existence of the Lynn plant in jeopardy. Anyone paying attention, however, heard the company’s thinly-veiled threat: accept the proposal without significant alterations or there will never be investment in Lynn. In many ways, GE’s stance reflected their longstanding bargaining position that the first offer was the only offer, and except for some cosmetic changes, workers could take it or leave it. 

People sensed the autonomy of the machinists would end as the work became more machine-paced and monitored much more closely with a new computer system. The membership questioned the design of the overall system and the skill level of the new job. 

Today, workers are raising the same issues about autonomy and work. By 2021, computer-paced work [had] moved from the factory to the office and even to the healthcare system. Epic Medical Information Systems, for instance, tracks the number of patients each physician sees in an hour. Many institutions such as the UW Medical Foundation specify the time a physician should spend with a patient and their compensation is influenced by their ability to meet those measurements. This kind of surveillance has consistently intensified across all manner of jobs. As a consequence, workers from coffee shops to Silicon Valley, from hospitals to the app-based gig jobs, have begun to push back, raising the same kinds of issues that we did at GE. 

Excessive and unpredictable scheduling; company driven efforts to eliminate affordable medical care, undermining job security and pensions are still with us because the interests of working people and our communities have not had the strength to insist that our interests become part of the design of the technologies powering our economy. Management’s designs have remained fixed on increasing shareholder value, by increasing productivity and thus maximizing profits, whatever the ancillary costs. 

There were several factors that pushed a significant portion of the IUE Local 201 membership to challenge GE and our national union on such a fundamental issue as investment in the Lynn operation. Fundamental to the effort was the rebuilding of a militant, union-conscious organization within Local 201. This was aided by the effective use of union committees by progressive people to serve as organizing centers within each local.