Management Committee

Peter Ackers

Peter Ackers is Emeritus Professor in the History of Industrial Relations, Loughborough University.

His research bridges contemporary social science and historical approaches to work and employment relations. On the contemporary HRM side, he has published widely on Employee Involvement, Voice and union-management Partnership, leading to the co-edited collection: Johnstone & Ackers, Finding a Voice at Work? New Perspectives on Employment Relations, Oxford University Press, 2015. He is also a Labour Historian, with an interest in Christian Nonconformity, who co-edited, Ackers & Reid, Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave, 2016. Combining these two strands is Peter’s research on the history of British Industrial Relations, as both a practical public arena and an academic social science field. A particular interest is the development of pluralist and social democratic ideas, culminating in his Trade Unions & the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg, Routledge 2024.

John Edmonds

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 issues.

John is a Visiting Professor at Durham University Business School and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College, London.

Michael Gold

Michael Gold is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Employment Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research focuses principally on EU employment policy, employee participation and the evolution of employment relations in the UK, while his latest book, co-authored with Chris Smith, is Where’s the ‘Human’ in Human Resources Management? Managing Work in the 21^st Century (Bristol University Press, 2023). He currently co-chairs the history of industrial relations study group on behalf of the British Universities’ Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA). Michael was active in his union (UCU), and served as 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.

Roger Jeary

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 is currently a member of the Research Panel 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 previously served as a director for the campaigning charity ShareAction which works with large and small investors to change unsustainable corporate practices and is now a listening volunteer at Samaritans. Roger also acts as Secretary to the Management Committee.

James Moher

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.

James Parker

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 Reid

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

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.

Dr Adrian Williamson KC

Adrian Williamson KC was called to the Bar in 1983 and has been a practising barrister in Keating Chambers since 1989, specialising in construction, engineering and technology disputes. He completed a PhD in 2014, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, on ‘The Birth of Economic Thatcherism’, supervised by Professor Martin Daunton. He has written extensively on 20th century British political, labour and gender history.

Susan Milner

Susan Milner is professor of European politics and society at the University of Bath. Having initially completed her doctoral research on the early international trade union movement, she specialises in comparative employment relations and related policy, with a particular interest in gender. She is the author of Women and Employment in Public Policy (OUP, 2024), based on research carried out during a Leverhulme major research fellowship (2020-23).

Peter Skyte

Peter Skyte studied Chemistry and worked in housing before becoming a trade union official with the (then) Society of Civil and Public Servants and ASTMS, MSF, Amicus and Unite.  He became a National Officer with responsibility for the IT and Communications Sector, covering 1400 workplaces across the private and public sectors, including IT, telecoms manufacturing and service companies and the broadcasters BBC and ITV. He was also European President of the IT Sector of the international labour organisation Union Network International.

He served on a number of UK Home Office committees advising government departments on work permits policy, the UK Electronics Leadership Council, and with the European Commission as a member of the EU Consultative Committee on Industrial Change

Since retirement from Unite, non-executive/public appointment roles have included serving as a public member and member coordinator of Network Rail, a member of the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office review panel and on the UK Digital Skills Task Force. He has also served as a volunteer adviser at Citizens’ Advice and is a member of the Industrial Law Society.

He has published ‘Allotment Plots’, a collection of short stories, and writes the ‘Letter to America’ blog on Substack. His interests include family, food and wine, travel, and supporting exasperating long-term causes as a Leeds United supporter.