Taking On the Boss? A Lifelong ‘Troublemaker’ Has Some Advice
By Joe Maniscalco
Cover of Frank Emspak memoir “Troublemaker: Saying No to Power.”
Frank Emspak has been making trouble for powerful elites his whole life. Sometimes as a pugnacious member of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers [UE], other times as executive producer of Workers Independent News (WINS). Now approaching 80, Frank Emspak is still mixing it up and making trouble — and he’s urging today’s generation of workers to do the same.
“You have to be in a position of stopping production,” Frank tells Work-Bites. “You have to be in a position of being able to threaten the production of wealth. [The bosses] don’t care about the production of ballbearings themselves — the ballbearings being produced are being produced to produce wealth.”
There was that time back in 1980s when Frank and another IUE Local 201 member suggested they and several hundred of their fellow workers at the GE plant in Lynn, Massachusetts ought to go up to Marblehead and “have lunch” with General Electric titan Jack Welch and maybe chat about the labor dispute they were having.
“Well, it was a nice day,” Frank says, “so, we took ten or twelve buses up to Marblehead and parked them in the middle of the town and went over to this place near [Jack’s] house and had lunch. He wasn’t there and eventually, everybody went back to work. The injunction came later — the charges, fines and everything else. But we thought it was important.”
“Troublemaker: Saying No To Power” is Frank Emspak’s newly released memoir chronicling his many decades spent inside the heart of the American Labor Movement.
“The point here,” Frank says from his home in Wisconsin, is if you’re gonna get involved in progressive activity — you really have to have some sense of class and be able to stand up for that. Stand up for the class and stand up to the pressure.”
Amazon may still be raking in over $600 billion in U.S. sales — but Frank, who’s professor emeritus of the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin, thinks the e-commerce giant is “really stupid” if it thinks it isn’t vulnerable to the collective might of American workers.
“Amazon, Toyota and the rest of them have assumed a supine and powerless labor movement,” he says “But when people get themselves together that production model is extraordinarily vulnerable. Amazon isn’t interested in a conversation [with workers]. Okay, fine — workers will organize. Amazon will become interested when the place isn’t working.”
“Class conscious at birth,” Frank’s father Julius Emspak helped craft the UE’s militant identity in the 1930s, serving as the organization’s secretary-treasurer for decades and later helping to steward it through the worst of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
“Initially, the AFL [American Federation of Labor] said the only way we’ll work with all these workers in these mass production industries is on our basis…divide them up. The workers who were young at the time, like my father said, ‘The hell with this — that doesn’t make any goddamned sense and we’re not gonna do that.’”
Frank says, the original Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO] “wasn’t formed because it was a cooperative relationship with the existing labor movement — it was formed in opposition to it.”
From 2001 to 2017, Workers Independent News broadcast worker-centric news from stations all across the country. Frank calls journalism’s value to the Labor Movement “incalculable. Without, he says, “We’re lost.”
“Every single major national news organization has two and three minutes devoted each hour to the stock market,” Frank says, “you listen to this for twenty-four-hours-a-day for your entire life you’re gonna think the world is controlled by the stock market. You’re going to work making something or doing something, but there’s no discussion about that whatsoever. So, you have no way of figuring out what’s going on. It’s a fundamental issue here.”
WIN was Frank’s answer to the news blackout working people experience.
“Our goal with WIN was to provide a place that working people and their organizations — meaning unions — would be able to say without filter, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ We weren’t advocating anything beyond that.”
Today’s generation of younger workers need to speak for themselves, Frank insists, not only for their own self-interests, but for the good of the Labor Movement and the entire nation.
“Speak in your own words,” he says. “Speak with your own agenda because nobody else is gonna do it. And if we don’t do it, we’re gonna continue to see a drop in our standard of living, a contraction of our democracy, and an increase in every negative aspect of our society. When workers are not at the table as an equal the society cannot function.”
The bosses at General Electric where Frank worked for more than and decade and served as an elected union officer had no interest in finishing workers with that seat.
“Their attitude towards the union was ‘Drop Dead!’ Frank says. “That was their starting, middle and ending point — it didn’t matter. The only time we were able to encourage the company to do the right thing was when we had the ability to squeeze them.