Ken Gill

He was the General Secretary of the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section (TASS), from 1974 to 1988, when it merged with ASTMS to form the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union (MSF).

As a young communist at the height of the Cold War, he travelled to East Germany for the 1951 World Youth Festival, and was briefly arrested while journeying there by the US military police.

The militancy of his Merseyside and Northern Ireland region saw Gill leading workers in a series of industrial battles over pay and conditions.

"[3] DATA's successor, the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section (TASS), became part of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) in 1971, although it remained quasi-autonomous.

[3] With the support of other left-wingers on the Council he helped lead a militant broad left 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 industrial relations of the nineteen seventies so difficult for successive governments, not least by consistently opposing an enforced incomes policy.

[3] He was a leading figure in union opposition to Barbara Castle's contentious 1969 bill on industrial relations, In Place of Strife.

In 1976 he "famously told the TUC Woman's Conference ... that Britain was still a 'socially backward' country,"[6] since despite the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act women would still need a 50 per cent pay increase to achieve parity with men.

When Mandela later visited the UK after his release from Robben Island, he chose the union's conference hall to meet and thank African National Congress exiles and activists.

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.