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George Loveless (preacher)
A Methodist lay preacher and farm labourer in Tolpuddle, Dorset, Loveless formed a friendly society in 1833 to resist wage cuts, meeting under the village sycamore now known as the Martyrs' Tree. He and five others were sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia for swearing a secret oath. A mass petition of around 800,000 signatures and a march through London won their pardon in 1836. The "Tolpuddle Martyrs" became the founding story of British trade unionism, and the TUC still holds an annual festival in the village.
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Samuel Gompers
Born
A London-born cigar maker, Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and led it for all but one year until 1924. His "pure and simple" unionism, organising skilled craft workers for wages, hours and conditions and avoiding a labour party, gave American unions their durable shape, and the AFL survives today in the AFL-CIO. The cost was exclusion: unskilled, Black, immigrant and women workers were often left out, which is why the CIO later broke away.
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Ben Tillett
Tillett, a tea warehouse labourer, led the 1889 London Dock Strike with Tom Mann and John Burns, when tens of thousands of casual dockers stopped work for the "docker's tanner", sixpence an hour. Australian unions sent around £30,000 to sustain them, and they won. The strike proved that unskilled workers could be organised and launched "new unionism"; Tillett's Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers' Union later merged into the Transport and General Workers' Union, now part of Unite.
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Mary Kenney O'Sullivan
Born
A Chicago bookbinder, Kenney O'Sullivan organised women in the printing and garment trades, became the American Federation of Labor's first woman national organiser in 1892, and in 1903 co-founded the Women's Trade Union League, which brought working women and wealthy "allies" together to fund strikes and lobby for protective laws. She also worked with Jane Addams at Hull House on Illinois's first factory inspection law. Her career shows how women built their own institutions when men's unions would not admit them.
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Mary Macarthur
Born
Macarthur founded the National Federation of Women Workers in 1906 for women in "sweated" trades that men's unions ignored, and campaigned for the Trade Boards Act 1909, which set legal minimum wages in chain-making, box-making and tailoring. The next year she led the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath, in the Black Country, on a ten-week strike that forced employers to pay the new rate. Trade boards became wages councils, the ancestor of Britain's national minimum wage.
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Clara Lemlich
At a mass meeting in New York in November 1909, 23-year-old Lemlich, a shirtwaist maker who had already been beaten on picket lines, interrupted the speeches to call for a general strike. Around 20,000 garment workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian women, walked out in the "Uprising of the 20,000", and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union grew from a small local into a major union. Blacklisted afterwards, Lemlich kept organising, later among housewives in rent and food price boycotts.
More about Clara Lemlich7
Rose Schneiderman
Born
Schneiderman, a cap maker, gave the speech after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which killed 146 garment workers, telling a wealthy audience that only a strong working-class movement would save lives. She led the New York Women's Trade Union League for decades and helped win the state's factory safety laws, then served as the only woman on the labor advisory board of Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration. Her phrase "bread and roses" summed up a demand for dignity as well as wages.
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Carl Legien
Born
Legien built Germany's Free Trade Unions into a centralised movement of millions, and in November 1918, amid revolution, signed the Stinnes-Legien agreement with industrialist Hugo Stinnes: employers recognised unions, accepted collective agreements, works committees and the eight-hour day. That bargain is the root of German "social partnership" and co-determination. In 1920 Legien called the general strike that defeated the Kapp Putsch. Radicals accused him of saving capitalism; he would have said he saved the unions.
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Albert Thomas (minister)
Born
Thomas, a French socialist who had run munitions production in the First World War, became the first director of the International Labour Office in 1920 and made it far more than a secretariat. He pushed governments to ratify conventions on working hours, night work and unemployment, built its research and inspection role, and defended its three-way structure of governments, employers and workers. The ILO outlived the League of Nations that created it and is the oldest agency in the UN system.
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Ernest Bevin
Before he was a minister, Bevin was the greatest union builder in British history. A former carter, he negotiated the 1922 merger of fourteen unions into the Transport and General Workers' Union and led it until 1940, when it was the largest union in the world. As wartime Minister of Labour he used that experience to manage the workforce by agreement, extending joint production committees. Left critics said he ran the union like a general; it lasted, as part of Unite, for a century.
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A. Philip Randolph
Born
Randolph took twelve years to win the first contract between a major company and a Black-led union: the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded in 1925, signed with the Pullman Company in 1937 after the company had fired organisers and funded rival unions. He then used that base for wider gains, threatening a march on Washington in 1941 that pushed Roosevelt to ban discrimination in defence industries, and chairing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
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John L. Lewis
Born
Lewis, the United Mine Workers' president for forty years, broke with the AFL in 1935 to found the Committee for Industrial Organization, which organised whole industries, steel, cars, rubber, regardless of skill, race or ethnicity. Within a few years the CIO had millions of members, and the steel and car contracts of 1937 changed American industry. Lewis was autocratic, fell out with Roosevelt and later with the CIO itself, but the industrial unions he launched endured.
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Sidney Hillman
Born
Hillman, a Lithuanian-born garment cutter, led the Amalgamated Clothing Workers from 1914 and built institutions around the union, not just inside it: the Amalgamated Bank in 1923, unemployment insurance funds negotiated with employers and union-sponsored cooperative housing in New York, all still operating. He co-founded the CIO with John L. Lewis and created its Political Action Committee in 1943, the model for union election spending ever since, which opponents attacked as machine politics.
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Harry Bridges
Born
An Australian-born longshoreman, Bridges led the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike and San Francisco general strike, which won dockers a union-run hiring hall in place of the daily "shape-up" where foremen picked men by favour or bribe. He built the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and led it until 1977, surviving repeated government attempts to deport him as a communist. The ILWU's hiring halls and rank-and-file democracy still operate on every West Coast port.
More about Harry Bridges15
Walter Reuther
Born
Reuther, beaten by Ford security men at the 1937 "Battle of the Overpass", led the United Auto Workers from 1946 to 1970 and negotiated the contracts that defined the American middle-class factory job: the 1950 "Treaty of Detroit" with General Motors, with pensions, health insurance and cost-of-living rises, and later supplementary unemployment pay. Critics argue the deal traded shop-floor power for benefits that left workers exposed when the car industry declined; for decades it set the pattern for private-sector bargaining.
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Larry Itliong
Born
The Delano grape strike of 1965 began with Filipino farmworkers, not with César Chávez. Itliong, a veteran organiser of the AFL-CIO's Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led the walkout on 8 September and then persuaded Chávez's mostly Mexican-American association to join, uniting the two groups in what became the United Farm Workers. The five-year strike and consumer boycott won the first major farmworker contracts in US history. Itliong left in 1971, frustrated that Filipino members were sidelined.
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Dolores Huerta
Born
Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 and was the United Farm Workers' chief negotiator, signing the 1970 grape contracts and directing the East Coast boycott. She lobbied for California's 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, still the only US law giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights, and coined "Sí, se puede". In March 2026 she publicly accused César Chávez of sexually assaulting her decades earlier, reshaping how the movement's history is told. She died in October 2026, aged 96.
More about Dolores Huerta18
Jack Jones (trade unionist)
Born
A Liverpool docker who fought in the Spanish Civil War, Jones made his name by shifting power in the Transport and General Workers' Union to shop stewards on the factory floor. As its general secretary from 1969 he helped design the 1970s "social contract" with Labour governments and pressed for the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, created in 1975 and still resolving disputes today. In retirement he built the National Pensioners Convention. Critics blamed the social contract era for the 1978 to 1979 strikes that followed.
More about Jack Jones (trade unionist)19
Ela Bhatt
Born
Most workers in India have no employer to bargain with, so Bhatt organised them anyway. In 1972 she founded the Self-Employed Women's Association in Ahmedabad for street vendors, head-loaders, home-based garment workers and waste pickers, and had to fight for it to be registered as a trade union at all. SEWA built its own cooperative bank in 1974, health and childcare cooperatives and legal campaigns for vending rights, and now has well over a million members. It is the model for informal-economy unions worldwide.
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Anna Walentynowicz
Born
The 1980 Gdańsk shipyard strike that created Solidarity began over the sacking of Walentynowicz, a crane operator and member of the underground Free Trade Unions of the Coast, five months before her retirement. Her reinstatement was the strikers' first demand, and the Gdańsk agreement that followed recognised the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. Lech Wałęsa became its face; Walentynowicz, who later broke with him, is a reminder that it was built by many organisers. She died in the 2010 Smolensk air crash.
More about Anna Walentynowicz21
Elijah Barayi
Black South African unions were only legalised in 1979, and Barayi, a mineworker and veteran of the ANC's 1950s campaigns, was a founder and vice-president of the National Union of Mineworkers, which grew rapidly under general secretary Cyril Ramaphosa. In 1985 he was elected first president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, a federation of over 30 unions that became a central force against apartheid and remains in alliance with the ANC, a relationship critics argue has blunted its independence.
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Ai-jen Poo
Domestic workers were deliberately excluded from US labour law in the 1930s, so Poo built an alternative. With Domestic Workers United in New York she organised nannies, cleaners and carers, largely immigrant women, to win the 2010 New York Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights, the first state law of its kind; similar laws have since passed in a dozen or so states. The National Domestic Workers Alliance she co-founded and led shows how workers without a single employer or union contract can still build lasting power.
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