Vocation : Politics : Labor unions

Philippe Martinez (born 1 April 1961) is a French trade unionist. He was the general secretary of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) from 2015 to 2023.

Sir Daniel McGarvey, CBE (16 September 1919 – 26 April 1977) was a British trade unionist.
McGarvey was born in Clydebank and attended Our Holy Redeemer School, then St Patrick's High School, Dumbarton. At the age of fifteen, he began working as an apprentice caulker.He became active in the United Society of Boilermakers and Iron and Steel Shipbuilders, being elected to its general council in 1951, and in 1954 to the executive council of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions. From 1958-65, he served on the National Executive Council of the Labour Party. In 1964, he was elected as General Secretary of the renamed Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers.In 1965, he was elected to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), and he became the President of the TUC in 1976, but died the following April, before completing his term.

Sir Gavin Harry Laird (14 March 1933 – 26 October 2017) was a Scottish trade unionist, who became General Secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU) and a Member of the Court of the Bank of England.
Growing up in Clydebank he attended a local high school then began working for Singer. He became an Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) shop steward there, then convenor.Three years after taking up a full-time position with the union, he was elected to the AEU executive and later elected AEU general secretary, remaining in that position after the merger which created the AEEU. He addressed the Confederation of British Industry annual conference in 1986 – an unusual move for a trade unionist at the time.He appeared as a castaway on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs on 25 October 1992, received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1994, was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) under Margaret Thatcher's government and knighted in 1995 at the behest of Tony Blair.He retired from the AEEU in 1995 and died in October 2017 at the age of 84 after a long illness.

Henri Louis Tolain (18 June 1828, Paris – 4 May 1897, Paris), was a leading member of the French trade union and socialist movement and a founding member of the First International and follower of Proudhon.

Bernard Thibault (born 2 January 1959) is a French trade unionist who was the secretary of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) between 1999 and 2013, a French workers' union. He represents the moderate wing of the CGT, as opposed to the more radical wing noted in Marseilles' trade union.
Bernard Thibault was born on January 2, 1959, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, from a family hailing from the Morvan area.
At the age of 15, he entered the SNCF apprenticeship centre in Noisy-le-Sec, which he left in 1976 with a qualification in general mechanics. He was then hired by the SNCF yard at Paris-la-Villette. In 1977, he joined the Confédération générale du travail, and was put in charge of the union's "Young workers commission". In 1980, he became secretary of the union in his train yard, and was later elected secretary of the CGT for all rail workers of the Eastern Paris railroad network.
During the strikes of 1986, he provided the impetus for the start of the strikes and is credited with forwarding the principle of coordinated strikes, which the unions had until then been reluctant to adopt. He promoted integrating non-unionist strikers into the decision process, which was largely left to general assemblies of workers at the local level (a practice that was repeated during the large 1995 strikes). He was at the time considered one of the main figures of the strike and a symbol of the renewal of the CGT.In 1987, he joined the French Communist Party and, shortly thereafter, the CGT federal office for rail workers. In 1997, he was appointed to the confederal office. During the 46th Congress of the CGT in January–February 1999, he succeeded to Louis Viannet as the head of the confederation. He also resigned his national responsibilities in the Communist Party, to fight the idea that the unions were the force driving the party.
Thanks to his comparatively young age, and to the economic recovery in France at the end of the 20th century, he managed to counter the sag in CGT members. The internal tensions in the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail brought about by the Fillon retirement law prompted members to switch unions and reinforce the CGT.
However, Thibault's efforts to push the CGT towards a more reformist stance, as witnessed for instance during the strikes of November 2007, was met with resistance within the leadership of the union, which for example did not give a voting directive to its members for the 2005 referendum on the European Constitution.

François Chérèque (1 June 1956 – 2 January 2017) was a French Trade unionist, and leader of the French trade union CFDT (French Democratic Confederation of Labour or Confédération française démocratique du travail).

Pierre Juquin (born 22 February 1930 in Clermont-Ferrand) is a French communist politician and trade unionist.

Philippe Poutou (French pronunciation: [filip putu]; born 14 March 1967) is a French far-left politician, former trade unionist and car factory worker. He was the New Anti-Capitalist Party's candidate in the presidential elections of 2012, 2017 and 2022, in which he respectively received 1.15%, 1.09% and 0.76% of the vote.

René Belin (14 April 1898 – 2 January 1977) was a French trade unionist and politician. In the 1930s he became one of the leaders of the French General Confederation of Labour.
He was strongly opposed to communism. In the prelude to World War II (1939–45) he favored a policy of appeasement. After the defeat of France, he was Minister of Industrial Production and Minister of Labour in the collaborationist Vichy Government, holding the latter office until April 1942. He oversaw the destruction of unionism. As a result, he was expelled from the CGT in 1944. After the war he tried to form an anti-communist union movement, but with limited success.

Philip Murray (May 25, 1886 – November 9, 1952) was a Scottish-born steelworker and an American labor leader. He was the first president of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the first president of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), and the longest-serving president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).