Richard Lipsitz, Jr. was born and raised in Buffalo. After initially attending George Washington University, he transferred to Antioch Washington-Baltimore ("Antioch East"), an experimental satellite campus of Antioch College, graduating in 1973 with a major in Political History. While in college, Lipsitz began his work in the labor movement, advocating for employees at George Washington University Hospital (now represented by 1199SEIU). After returning to Buffalo, he was elected president of the Civil Service Employees Association chapter (CSEA #303) representing Roswell Park Cancer Institute (now Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center). From 1987 until 1995 he served on the AFL-CIO Western New York Hospital and Nursing Home Council, a body created by three sponsoring unions: The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (UNITE HERE, Local 4), and the Laundry and Dry Cleaning International Union. The council was later dissolved, and the employees are now represented by 1199SEIU Upstate. During this time, he completed a Master of Science degree in Education from Buffalo State College, graduating in 1992.

In 1995 Lipsitz began to work with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), including Local 264 and Joint Council 46. From 1999 until 2002, he was the director of the Worker Institute at the Cornell ILR School extension in Buffalo, an initiative that offers union skills workshops, courses for credit, and other training. He was elected president of the Western New York Area Labor Federation (ALF) in fall 2011 and reelected twice, his final term ending March 2021. In 2012 Lipsitz joined the Erie County Industrial Development Agency (ECIDA), serving as Vice Chair.

The AFL-CIO is a federation of 55 unions. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was founded in 1886, and the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) was formed within the AFL in 1935. CIO left and formed an independent federation renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938. In 1955 AFL and CIO merged, with George Meany serving as president. The Western New York Area Labor Federation (ALF) was established in 2001 and is one of nearly 500 state and local labor councils of the AFL-CIO. The ALF consists of five Western New York Central Labor Councils, governed by seven Officers, and 25 Board Members from affiliated Local Unions. The five councils include the Buffalo Labor Council representing Erie County; the Niagara/Orleans Labor Council representing all of Niagara County and the western part of Orleans County; Dunkirk; Jamestown; and the Cattaraugus/Allegany Labor Council representing those two counties in the Southern Tier.

Richard Lipsitz, Jr. is the son of lawyer Richard Lipsitz, Sr. (1920-2018, UB Law ‘43), who represented Vietnam War protesters, advocated for civil rights with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Coalition for Economic Justice, and defended four University at Buffalo faculty members and a library employee in the 1967 landmark Supreme Court case that struck down the Feinberg Law, a decision that protected the freedom of association and academic freedom under the First Amendment. The University Archives holds the Richard Lipsitz, Sr. papers, MS 5.

Other repositories with labor collections include The Kheel Center, affiliated with Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations; the George Meany Memorial Archives, housed at the University of Maryland, which holds the AFL-CIO records; the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit; and the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University's Bobst Library.