Ken Gill (30 August 1927 – 23 May 2009) was a British trade union leader. He was the General Secretary of the

Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section The Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section (TASS) was a British trade union. History The union was founded in 1913 by 200 draughtsmen, as the Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen (AESD). It expanded rapidly, and ...

(TASS), from 1974 to 1988, when it merged with ASTMS to form the

Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union Manufacturing, Science and Finance (or the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union; almost exclusively known as MSF) was a trade union in Britain. Over eighty members of Parliament (primarily members of the Labour Party) were members. Histor ...

(MSF). He was General Secretary of the MSF, 1988–1992, initially jointly with

Clive Jenkins David Clive Jenkins (2 May 1926 – 22 September 1999) was a British trade union leader. "Organising the middle classes", his stated recreation in '' Who's Who'', sums up both his sense of humour and his achievements in the British trade union m ...

. A committed Communist, he was elected to the TUC General Council in 1974, and was a prominent figure in the militant

industrial relations Industrial relations or employment relations is the multidisciplinary academic field that studies the employment relationship; that is, the complex interrelations between employers and employees, labor/trade unions, employer organizations, ...

of the 1970s. From 1981 to 1987 he was a member of the

Commission for Racial Equality The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) was a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom which aimed to address racial discrimination and promote racial equality. The commission was established in 1976, and disbanded in 2007 when its ...

Background

Ken Gill was born in

Melksham Melksham () is a town on the River Avon in Wiltshire, England, about northeast of Trowbridge and south of Chippenham. At the 2011 census, the Melksham built-up area had a population of 19,357, making it Wiltshire's fifth-largest settlement aft ...

, Wiltshire, in 1927.Green, John, and Boncza, Michal (eds, 2009)
Hung, drawn and quartered – the caricatures of Ken Gill
Gill was politicised when young, having experienced poverty in his childhood during the Great Depression. He attended a

grammar school A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching Latin, but more recently an academically oriented secondary school ...

and was offered officer training during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, but refused this owing to a political opposition to the officer class. In 1943, aged 15, he became an apprentice draughtsman. During the war his family took in a lodger, a cobbler and communist who convinced the young Gill of the cause of socialism. In 1945 he was a prominent campaigner for the local

Labour Labour or labor may refer to: * Childbirth, the delivery of a baby * Labour (human activity), or work ** Manual labour, physical work ** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer ** Organized labour and the labour ...

candidate, who was elected as the first local Labour MP. In 1949, at the end of his apprenticeship, he moved to London. As a young communist at the height of the Cold War, he travelled to

East Germany East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...

for the 1951

World Youth Festival The World Festival of Youth and Students is an international event organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the International Union of Students after 1947. History The festival has been held regularly since 1947 as an ev ...

, and was briefly arrested while journeying there by the US military police. By his early thirties Gill had become a director of a successful small engineering firm.

Trade union career

In 1962 Gill stood for office in the Draughtsmen's and Allied Technicians' Association (DATA), being elected a regional official. The militancy of his

Merseyside Merseyside ( ) is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in North West England, with a population of 1.38 million. It encompasses both banks of the Mersey Estuary and comprises five metropolitan boroughs: Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wi ...

and

Northern Ireland Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is variously described as a country, province or region. Nort ...

region saw Gill leading workers in a series of industrial battles over pay and conditions. As a result of his success in this, he was elected as deputy general secretary of the union in 1968, bringing him back to London. ''"As former colleagues attest, Ken was widely respected as a leader, winning people by persuasion rather than using his authority."'' DATA's successor, the

(TASS), became part of the

Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers The Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) was a major British trade union. It merged with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union to form the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union in 1992. History The history of t ...

(AUEW) in 1971, although it remained quasi-autonomous.Peter Barberis, John McHugh, Mike Tyldesle
Encyclopedia of British and Irish political organizations parties, groups
accessed 28 April 2009 During the merger talks

MI5 The Security Service, also known as MI5 ( Military Intelligence, Section 5), is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), G ...

broke into Gill's South London home to bug discussions going on there. Gill became the General Secretary of TASS in 1974, and that same year was the third communist to be elected on to the TUC General Council,'' Daily Telegraph'', 24 May 2009
Ken Gill
/ref> with over 7 million votes. With the support of other left-wingers on the Council he helped lead a militant

broad left The Broad Left was a political faction within the National Union of Students of the United Kingdom (NUS) during the 1970s. It consisted of a working relationship between the Labour Party, the Liberal Party, Plaid Cymru, the Communist Party of ...

grouping, which played a key role in the ideological and economic battles of the time. He was a leading member of the ' awkward squad' of trade union leaders which made the

of the nineteen seventies so difficult for successive governments, not least by consistently opposing an enforced

incomes policy Incomes policies in economics are economy-wide wage and price controls, most commonly instituted as a response to inflation, and usually seeking to establish wages and prices below free market level. Incomes policies have often been resorted to ...

. He was a leading figure in union opposition to

Barbara Castle Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, (''née'' Betts; 6 October 1910 – 3 May 2002), was a British Labour Party politician who was a Member of Parliament from 1945 to 1979, making her one of the longest-serving female MPs in Bri ...

's contentious 1969 bill on industrial relations, ''

In Place of Strife ''In Place of Strife'' ( Cmnd 3888) was a UK Government white paper written in 1969. It was a proposed act to use the law to reduce the power of trade unions in the United Kingdom, but was never passed into law. The title of the paper was a rework ...

''. From the mid-1970s Gill used his position on the TUC Council to push for more radical policies in support of equal opportunities. In 1976 he "famously told the TUC Woman's Conference ... that Britain was still a 'socially backward' country," since despite the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act women would still need a 50 per cent pay increase to achieve parity with men. In 1982 he warned against racial prejudice within trade unions, saying that black workers would form their own trade unions if prejudice prevented them from being elected to union posts. Gill was also an internationalist, pushing within the TUC for more progressive positions internationally. Gill and his union were among the earliest active supporters of the fight against South Africa's

apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

. On Gill's initiative, the union guaranteed the deposit for the 1988 stadium concert that celebrated Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday. When Mandela later visited the UK after his release from

Robben Island Robben Island ( af, Robbeneiland) is an island in Table Bay, 6.9 kilometres (4.3 mi) west of the coast of Bloubergstrand, north of Cape Town, South Africa. It takes its name from the Dutch word for seals (''robben''), hence the Dutch/Afrik ...

, he chose the union's conference hall to meet and thank

African National Congress The African National Congress (ANC) is a social-democratic political party in South Africa. A liberation movement known for its opposition to apartheid, it has governed the country since 1994, when the first post-apartheid election install ...

exiles and activists. In 1984 Gill became chairman of the

People's Press Printing Society The People's Press Printing Society (PPPS) is a readers' co-operative with the purpose of owning and publishing a left-wing, British, daily newspaper. The co-operative was established in 1945, with shares sold at £1. Originally the paper was title ...

, the cooperative which publishes '' The Morning Star''. Gill, along with a group of so-called "

Tankie Tankie is a pejorative label for leftists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history. The term was origina ...

" members, was later expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain when the paper's editor refused to follow the new

Eurocommunist Eurocommunism, also referred to as democratic communism or neocommunism, was a trend in the 1970s and 1980s within various Western European communist parties which said they had developed a theory and practice of social transformation more rele ...

party line. In 1985/86 Gill became the only communist ever to become President of the Trades Union Congress, although by then, following the defeat of the 1984 miners' strike, militancy was in retreat. TASS demerged from the AUEW in 1985, and in 1988 merged with ASTMS to form the

(MSF), then Britain's fifth-largest union, with 600,000 members. Gill was General Secretary of the MSF, 1988–1992, initially jointly with

. Gill retired as a full-time trade union official in 1992. ''"Despite being among the most prominent communists in the country, Gill always saw himself first of all as a trade unionist."'' In 1993 he was voted the "Trade Unionists' Trade Unionist" in a survey carried out by ''

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the ...

'' newspaper. "Ken never fitted the cliché image of a communist. While he could be forceful and committed, he was never dogmatic or unnecessarily aggressive." He believed that the Labour Party was central to radical social change. A lifetime supporter of the Soviet Union, he was expelled from the British Communist Party in 1985, when it broke with Moscow.

Retirement

After his retirement, Gill continued campaigning, including against the

2003 Iraq war The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a United States-led invasion of the Republic of Iraq and the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion phase began on 19 March 2003 (air) and 20 March 2003 (ground) and lasted just over one month, including ...

. He also played a key role in the 1993 founding of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in the UK, becoming its first chair, only stepping down in 2008.''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' (f ...

'', 26 May 2009
Ken Gill: Communist trade union leader
/ref> Gill was also known for his caricatures of fellow trade unionists, and often made on scraps of paper during meetings and conferences. An exhibition of his work was held at Congress House in 2007, and a book of his caricatures was published in April 2009.'' Morning Star'', 28 April 2009
'National treasure' publishes caricatures
/ref>

Books

* Ken Gill (Author), John Green and Michal Boncza (Editors), 2009 �

Artery Publications, . The book is a selection of Gill's caricatures.

The Ken Gill Memorial Fund

A non-charitable trust was established in 2010 by Ken's family and close friends to commemorate Ken's life and to continue his life's work. Among its objectives are supporting the ''Morning Star'' newspaper, supporting the trade union movement and workers' rights through co-operation with th
Institute of Employment Rights
and to support solidarity with Cuba, working alongside th
Cuba Solidarity Campaign
Trustees included

Rodney Bickerstaffe Rodney Kevan Bickerstaffe (6 April 1945 – 3 October 2017) was a British trade unionist. He was General Secretary of the National Union of Public Employees (1982–1993) and UNISON (1996–2001), Britain's largest trade union at the time. He l ...

, former general secretary of

Unison In music, unison is two or more musical parts that sound either the same pitch or pitches separated by intervals of one or more octaves, usually at the same time. ''Rhythmic unison'' is another term for homorhythm. Definition Unison or per ...

, the UK's largest public services union.

References

External links

The Ken Gill Memorial Fund
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gill, Ken 1927 births 2009 deaths British caricaturists Communist Party of Great Britain members Communist Party of Britain members General Secretaries of MSF General Secretaries of the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section People from Melksham British communists Members of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress