Douglas Nicholls (born 1956) is a British trade union leader and writer.
Nicholls was a part-time youth worker in Oxford in 1975, when he joined the Community and Youth Workers' Union (CYWU). In 1982, he moved to Coventry to work full-time in the field, and in 1987 he was elected as general secretary of the CYWU. [1]
He was Secretary of the Coventry Trade Union Council 1984-1994 and the Secretary of the Coventry Miners' Support Committee during the great strike 1984/85.
In 2007, Nicholls took the CYWU into a merger with the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU); [2] a few months later, the TGWU became part of Unite the Union, and Nicholls served as a national secretary of Unite until 2011. [3]
Nicholls was elected to the Executive of the General Federation of Trade Unions in 1995 and served as its President from 2007 until 2009. He was elected as the Federation's General Secretary in 2012. [4]
He became Chair of the national Chooseyouth campaign in 2011. This is an organisation composed of most youth service related organisations and young people's groups that campaigns for a statutory Youth Service.
In 2015, Nicholls became the first chair of Trade Unionists Against the European Union. [5]
In 2021 he was elected as the first Chair of Rebuild Britain. www.rebuildbritain.org.uk.
Anthony Woodley, Baron Woodley is a British trade unionist who was the Joint-General Secretary of Unite, a union formed through the merger of Amicus and the Transport and General Workers' Union, from 2007 to 2011. Despite stepping down as Joint-General Secretary, he remained as the Head of Organising for Unite until December 2013 and is still a consultant to the union. He was previously the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers union (T&G) from 2004 to 2007.
In British politics, an affiliated trade union is one that is linked to the Labour Party. The party was created by the trade unions and socialist societies in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee and the unions have retained close institutional links with it.
The Transport and General Workers' Union was one of the largest general trade unions in the United Kingdom and Ireland – where it was known as the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers' Union (ATGWU) to differentiate itself from the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union – with 900,000 members. It was founded in 1922 and Ernest Bevin served as its first general secretary.
Ronald Todd was an English Trade union leader who served as the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union from 1985 until 1992. He was a member of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, served as the Chair of the (TUC) International Committee, a member of the National Economic Development Council and president of the Trade Union Unity Trust and was an honorary vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was a committed Internationalist, a relentless campaigner for Nuclear disarmament and an active campaigner in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, who counted Nelson Mandela as a close friend.
The Workers' Union was a general union based in the United Kingdom, but with some branches in other countries. During the 1910s, it was the largest general union in the UK, but it entered a rapid decline in the 1920s, and eventually became part of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU).
James Larkin Jones, known as Jack Jones, was a British trade union leader and General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union.
Robert Williams was a British trade union organiser.
The Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians (UCATT) was a British and Irish trade union, operating in the construction industry. It was founded in 1971, and merged into Unite on 1 January 2017.
The Modern Records Centre (MRC) is the specialist archive service of the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, located adjacent to the Central Campus Library. It was established in October 1973 and holds the world's largest archive collection on British industrial relations, as well as archives relating to many other aspects of British social, political and economic history.
The Community and Youth Workers Union (CYWU) was a British trade union created in 1938 by ten female voluntary sector workers. It is now a section of Unite the Union. Its members were mainly made up of youth workers, workers in youth theatre, community education, outdoor education, play workers and personal advisers/mentors.
The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) is the world's largest trade union federation.
Arthur Creech Jones was a British trade union official and politician. Originally a civil servant, his imprisonment as a conscientious objector during the First World War forced him to change careers. He was elected to Parliament in 1935 and developed a reputation for interest in colonial matters, gaining the nickname "unofficial member of the Kikuyu at Westminster". He served in the Colonial Office in the Labour government of 1945–1950. After losing his seat in the 1950 general election he was involved in writing and lecturing about British colonies, before returning to Parliament in 1954. Initially, he was known as Arthur Jones, but throughout his time in politics he invariably used his middle name.
Diana Holland is a British trade unionist who is the Assistant General Secretary of Unite and the Treasurer of the Labour Party.
Alexander Harper Kitson was a British trade unionist and Labour Party official.
The Socialist Party is a Trotskyist political party in England and Wales. Founded in 1997, it had formerly been Militant, an entryist group in the Labour Party from 1964 to 1991, which became Militant Labour from 1991 until 1997.
Charles Henry Urwin was a British trade unionist.
Edward Haigh was a British trade unionist.
Leonard Forden was a British trade unionist. He served on both the General Council of the Trades Union Congress and the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party.
Brian Gerald Nicholson was a British trade unionist.
Graham Stevenson was a British communist, trade union leader, and historian who specialised in the history of British socialist and labour activist biographies. He led a career as one of the most influential trade union leaders in Britain, becoming the national secretary of the TGWU IN 1999, and as a founder and later president in 2009 of the European Transport Union Federation, he helped organise strikes across European docks in 2003, forcing the European Union to stall privatisation plans. Between 2007 and 2008, Stevenson played a key part in the negotiations that formed Unite the Union, the largest trade union in the United Kingdom. He also served on the Executive and Political Committee of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), and served as the treasurer of the Marx Memorial Library from 2013 to 2019.