Peter Ackers is Professor of Employment Relations at Leicester Business School, De Montfort University. His article, 'Gramsci at the miners’ strike: remembering the 1984–1985 Eurocommunist alternative industrial relations strategy', was published in Labor History, 11 March 2014. Peter has been engaged on three projects. With Stewart Johnstone he edited Finding a Voice: New Perspectives on Employment Relations (Oxford University Press 2015). With Alastair Reid he is working on an ‘Other Worlds of Labour’ edited collection for Palgrave, which challenges state socialist readings of twentieth-century British labour by exploring traditions of organising within civil society, such as trade unions, co-operatives, religious non-conformity, and women’s community action. Peter is also working on a biographical study of Professor Hugh Clegg, a leading academic and public policy figure during the ‘crisis’ of post-war British industrial relations. peter.ackers@dmu.ac.uk
John Edmonds is a trade unionist and specialist in work organisation. Until 2003, John was General Secretary of the GMB trade union. During that period John served as President of the TUC, as a member of the Executive of the ETUC and as a member of the Council of ACAS. More recently John has focused on gender equality, co-authoring three books with Eva Tutchell, and on climate change as a Director of Salix Finance, the state owned company funding the reduction of carbon emissions by the public sector. John is a Visiting Professor at Durham University Business School and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College, London.
Michael Gold is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Employment Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, and specialises principally in EU employment policy and employee participation. He currently co-chairs the history of industrial relations study group on behalf of the British Universities’ Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA). His latest book, co-authored with Chris Smith, is Where’s the ‘Human’ in Human Resources Management. Managing Work in the 21st Century, published by Bristol University Press (2023). Michael has always been active in his union (UCU) and was a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames for eight years, five as Leader. He was a Labour Parliamentary candidate in the 1987 and 1993 general elections.
Denis Gregory teaches Labour Relations and Economics at Ruskin College, Oxford. He is the Director of the Trade Union Research Unit (TURU) and was the Academic Co-ordinator for the BA in Law and International Labour and Trade Union Studies at Ruskin until 2010. He has published widely in the areas of industrial relations, work organisation and industrial economics. He has acted as a collective bargaining consultant to unions for many years in a range of industries and services. Denis works extensively as a trainer and consultant to assist both unions and management in developing social dialogue and employee engagement agreements and practice. dgregory@ruskin.ac.uk
Roger Jeary worked for the trade union movement for 35 years of his career. During that time he worked as a negotiator across all sectors, specialising in the manufacturing sectors as a National Officer. He went on to become the Director of Research for Unite and its predecessor, Amicus, in which role he was responsible, amongst other things, for developing industrial strategy policy papers and presenting policy ideas to government. Roger currently blogs on behalf of the Institute of Employment Rights which campaigns for fairer employment and trade union rights.
Roger has a post graduate degree in Industrial Relations and Employment Law. Since his retirement he has served as a director for the campaigning charity ShareAction which works with large and small investors to change unsustainable corporate practices. Roger also acts as Secretary to the Management Committee.
Jim Moher built a 30 year plus, union involvement in three major trade union organisations (T&GWU, NCU and CWU) and the wider Labour Movement, since his migration to London building sites from Ireland in the 1960s. After a formative influence with the T&G for over ten years, he became a senior national officer in the NCU and CWU (Legal Secretary and Political Secretary). From the 1980s until his retirement at 60 in 2006, he experienced the whole range of thoughts, emotions and actions of those heady days. In that time, he developed a keen interest in the wider history of trade unions and Labour movement also. In his spare time, he produced a study of the late eighteenth/early 19th century engineering (millwright) London area craft combinations which provoked the Combination laws. For this part-time study, he was awarded a Doctorate from London University in 1989. After retirement from the union, he remained active as a Brent Labour councillor and Brent Council Cabinet member (2002- 2016), as Parliament Candidate for Brent North 1991-2 and in the formation of the History & Policy Trade Union Forum since 2007. He published a biography of TUC General Secretary and IFTU President, (1926-46), entitled ‘Walter Citrine, Forgotten Statesman of the Trades Union Congress’, in 2021. He remains an active contributor to the work of the H&P Trade Union & Employment Forum.
Dr James Parker is a Graduate Tutor in the History Department at the University of York, and an Associate Tutor in the History Department at the University of Sheffield, working on modern Britain and specialising in the areas of labour and political culture. His research interests include the role of organisation and ideology in politics, particularly in relation to political parties, trade unions, and the co-operative movement. His 2018 PhD thesis on the role of trade unions in interwar Labour politics, which he is adapting into a book, is available open access here. James is on Twitter at @jamesmtparker
Alastair J. Reid is a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge where he was Director of Studies in History for many years. His main research has been in the field of British trade union and labour history. He has published an innovative survey for Penguin, 'United We Stand. A History of British Trade Unions' (2005), and a challenging case study of the shipbuilding industry, 'The Tide of Democracy. Shipyard Workers and Social Relations in Britain, 1870-1950' (2010). He has always been very interested in how history can help us to understand the present and possibly even anticipate the future, and was a co-founder of History & Policy in 2002. With Peter Ackers he has recently co-edited 'Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain. Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century' (2016).
Sarah Veale CBE retired as Head of Equality and Employment Rights at the TUC in 2015. At the TUC Sarah was responsible for the organisation’s work on equality and trade union and employment rights.
Sarah was, until January 2017, a Board member at the Equality and Human Rights Commission. She was, until June 2018, a member of the Regulatory Policy Committee, which provides independent assessment of Government regulatory and de-regulatory proposals. From July 2018 to April 2019, Sarah was a member of the Fair Work Commission, which produced a report and recommendations to the Wales Government in March 2019.
In the past Sarah was a member of the ACAS Council and the HSE Board.
Sarah is currently a non executive Director of the United Kingdom Accreditation Service and Chair of the Advisory Council for Protect, the whistle-blowers charity.
Adrian Williamson QC has practised as a commercial barrister since 1985. He completed his PhD at Cambridge in 2014, supervised by Professor Martin Daunton. This is now published as Conservative Economic Policymaking and the Birth of Thatcherism, 1964-1979 (Palgrave Macmillan: 2015). He has also published on the Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy.
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