Tom left school at the age of thirteen and became a sheet-metal worker at Wunderlich Ltd, coming under the influence of socialist Paddy Drew, later a founder of the Communist Party of Australia.
The Bruce-Page government barred him from attending the 1927 Pan-Pacific Trade Union Congress in China, but he went instead to Moscow to a meeting with the Comintern.
He met Mary Margaret Lamm, née McAdam, at the Unemployed Workers' Movement in Glebe; she was widowed in 1931 and she lived with Wright for a decade before they were married on 23 January 1941 at Five Dock.
[1] In 1936 Wright was elected state secretary of the sheet-metal workers' union, and in 1937 became vice-president of the Labor Council of New South Wales.
After criticising the conciliation commissioners during the 1949 coal strike he faced, but escaped, prosecution, and in 1953 he was elected to Sydney City Council as one of the first two communists (with Ron Maxwell) to sit on that body.