[ The University of Wisconsin at Madison was a hotbed of student
radicalism in the 1960s. and left-wing activists there were among the
first of their generation to organize around issues related to their
own mis-treatment as workers.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SIXTIES RADICALS RECALL FIGHTING TIMES IN US LABOR  
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Steve Early
October 7, 2022
Portside
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_ The University of Wisconsin at Madison was a hotbed of student
radicalism in the 1960s. and left-wing activists there were among the
first of their generation to organize around issues related to their
own mis-treatment as workers. _

,

 

In 1963, undergraduates employed in campus jobs formed a Wisconsin
Student Employees Union to force the administration to raise their
wages to the federal minimum (a 50 cent per hour increase). Seven
years later, the UW Teaching Assistants Association organized the
first TA strike in U.S. history, a 24-day walk-out that won union
recognition.

TROUBLEMAKER: Saying No to Power
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by Frank Emspak

Publisher: Frank Emspak; 326 pages

August 15, 2022

ISBN-13: 979-8218038915

Wisconsin graduates like Frank Emspak, a co-founder of the Student
Employees Union, went on to play key roles in the labor movement,
locally, state-wide, and in others states. Emspak has just published a
memoir, called _Troublemaker: Saying No to Power_ (available on Amazon
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about his own transition from being a campus agitator to a skilled
blue-collar worker in unionized workplaces in the 1970s and 80s. His
book contains much helpful advice for younger radicals seeking to
revitalize organized labor fifty years later. It should be required
reading by anyone trying to build a union reform caucus, which can
actually oust old guard officials and replace them with rank-and-file
militants more committed to membership mobilization and strike
activity.

Today, that kind of internal struggle is more likely to occur in
education, healthcare, or service sector labor organizations, rather
than older industrial unions.  Socialists who become workplace
organizers often choose companies—like Starbucks or Amazon--without
established unions so they can play a catalytic role in new organizing
or first contract struggles.  Yet, the United Auto Workers (UAW) is
currently in the midst of a first-ever direct election of its top
officers, which has created a new political opening for UAW
dissidents, young and old. And, with a recent national leadership
change for the better in the Teamsters, Teamsters for a Democratic
Union (TDU)—formed 46 years ago with much socialist help--is now
well positioned to shape contract campaigning in the nation’s
largest private sector bargaining unit, which covers 230,000 workers
at United Parcel Service.

In _Troublemaker_, Emspak describes shop floor organizing in an era
when national bargaining on that scale was still the norm, rather than
the exception, and unionized manufacturing had yet to be decimated by
de-industrialization. Even when good-paying factory jobs were far more
plentiful, however, management and its labor union partners had a
shared interest in barring the door to former campus agitators like
the author, who left UW with a PhD in labor history. Emspak also faced
an additional challenge landing a job at General Electric in Lynn,
Massachusetts, then the largest industrial complex in New England. 

A UE Pedigree

His father, Julius, had been a GE worker, along with five other
members of two previous generations of his family. But, after going to
college and graduate school. Julius Emspak became a key organizer and
then longtime national officer of the United Electric Workers (UE).
With help from Communist Party (CP) members or sympathizers, the UE
emerged from the 1930s as one of the biggest and most effective
industrial unions in the country. But the UE’s left-wing political
orientation led to its purge from the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO) in 1949. During the 1950s, the union’s
membership was decimated by CIO raids and decertification elections.
These resulted in GE workers in Lynn and other locations becoming
members of its more compliant replacement, the International Union of
Electrical Workers (IUE), now part of the Communications Workers of
America (CWA). 

According to Emspak, even after the legal and political assault on the
UE, GE still had to contend with “a large group of workers in Lynn
who had a strong sense of what a real union could be” and welcomed
the chance to unite with “a new generation of class- conscious
troublemakers.” The author became one of them only due to the
fortuitous intervention of two under-cover UE sympathizers. One helper
was a foreman who hired Emspak without the knowledge of higher ups in
the company. A second was a shop steward, who counseled him not to
sign an IUE membership card, alerting the union hall of his hiring,
until his probationary period was over and he could only be dismissed
for just cause.

Once on the job, Emspak faced the challenge of making friends and
fending off enemies, of whom he had many in management and the union
officialdom. Along with other “colonizers” at GE from a variety of
left-wing groups, he had to endure heavy red-baiting, often
accompanied by physical threats. (On one occasion, Emspak was
assaulted by hostile officials from other IUE locals when he attended
a national union meeting and spoke out against GE proposals for a
two-tier wage system,)  The author learned to become an effective
workplace organizer by building personal relationships and joining
social networks based on sharing meals on the job or gardening with
co-workers on a company-provided plot at United Shoe Machine, a UE
shop where Emspak worked before joining the IUE at GE.

Shop Floor Leadership

In his memoir, Emspak also stresses the importance of publishing
rank-and-file newsletters or revitalizing local union committees as a
vehicle for addressing shop floor issues often ignored or downplayed
by higher ranking union officials.  In IUE Local 201, the “left
militant coalition” that Emspak helped to build was heavily
represented “on the health and safety committee, the women’s
committee and the new technology committee—groups that believed in
and tried to implement membership-driven actions for health and safety
and against sex bias and the challenges of new technology.”

At GE, the IUE contract included a rare open-ended grievance
procedure. This made it possible for workers to strike, legally and
during the life of the agreement, over unresolved grievances, if the
action was approved by the Local 201executive board.  Troublemaker is
filled with colorful and instructive accounts of direct action on the
job, a tradition currently undergoing a revival in some non-union
workplaces in the U.S.

Helping to lead shop-floor struggles made both authors viable
candidates for local union leadership positions. Emspak was elected to
the IUE’s national GE conference board and four times as a Local 201
executive board member, representing 1,000 workers at a satellite
plant in a GE local with a total membership of 8,000. He also mounted
a strong local-wide campaign for assistant business manager, losing by
a mere 38 votes out of 4,834 cast. In a second bid for that leadership
post, he and other militants were defeated after a plant-wide strike
over accumulated grievances “lasted a month and achieved almost
nothing.” By stonewalling the union and “making its progressive
leadership look incompetent,” GE was able to install a “less
confrontational group” at the 201 hall.

During his union career, Emspak found himself at odds, on several
occasions, with his own outside political organization, the Communist
Party (CP). In 1979, for example, he became part of a “worker-led
campaign against a sub-standard national contract” with GE,
organized in response to the “absence of leadership at the top of
the union and no serious planning for a strike.”  As opposition
grew among IUE Local 201 members, even the local’s business manager,
a member of the national negotiating committee, urged rejection of the
tentative agreement with the company. But, in the middle of this
fight, the CP changed its position and supported the same GE
settlement that its leadership had previously criticized. When Emspak
continued to campaign for a “No” vote, this had the helpful effect
of demonstrating that his “loyalty was to the membership and not the
international union or the CP.” 

Six years later, he reports, history repeated itself “when the Party
endorsed union contracts with GE that Party members at GE had been
leading the opposition against.” As Emspak recalls, “a top down
decision was made, without input from many of us on the ground…At
that point, there did not seem to be any benefit from being in the CP
and most in the largest shop club in the industry simply left it.”

A Labor Educator

Emspak’s experience as a rank-and-file activist helped shape his
later work as a labor educator and labor journalist. After he left GE
and IUE Local 201 in 1987, he transitioned first to state and federal
jobs as a valued advisor to unions on the impact of technological
change in workplaces in the U.S. and Europe Then, he returned to his
alma mater to teach shop stewards, local officers, and union staff
members in labor education courses run by the University of Wisconsin
School for Workers. 

During Emspak’s career there, he founded Workers Independent News
(WIN), which operated for sixteen years and, at its peak, produced
pro-labor radio show content airing on 150 stations nation-wide, which
reached hundreds of thousands of listeners. In this new arena, Emspak
found himself walking a familiar tight-rope. During its existence, WIN
raised several million dollars from twenty-two national unions, and
additional donations from over one hundred local unions. But labor
radio sponsors from the AFL-CIO and Change to Win affiliates were not
always appreciative of “independent” reporting on their own
strikes, contract campaigns, or internal politics. 

As WIN’s founder reports, “we faced pressure to restrict our
coverage to conform to the interests and opinions of union
leadership…press freedom did not seem to be of particular
concern.” The WIN experience leaves the question of how to finance
independent labor journalism unanswered—but, in Emspak’s view,
“points to developing a funding model that is widespread and not
dependent on institutional union support.”

As a memoirist today, the author of _Troublemaker_ has no WIN-driven
need for self-censorship any longer. He has clearly been liberated to
write a candid and illuminating account of his own past labor and
political activism. The granular lessons that Emspak provides will be
very useful to younger progressives who share his belief that only
working class organizing can alter the balance of power between
capital and labor, on the job and in the community.
 

_[STEVE EARLY has been active in the union movement since 1972, as an
organizer and journalist. He is the author of five books about labor
or politics, mostly recently Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends
and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs
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from Duke University Press. He can be reached at [email protected].]_

* Labor
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* Left Politics
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* Labor Organizing
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* Trade Unions
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* electrical workers
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* UE
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* United Electrical Workers Union
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* student movement
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* peace movement
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* 1960s
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* Wisconsin
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* University of Wisconsin
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* Massachusetts
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