Black Trade Union Oral History Project (2022-23)

From left to right: Maureen Loxley MBE, Amarjite Singh and Lorna Campbell

Collaborating with Trades Union Congress (TUC) Equality staff, the TUC Library and London Metropolitan University students collected oral history recordings with seven significant trade union activists in a pilot project in 2023. The focus was on Black workers who had pushed for Black workers’ rights and self-determining structures within the trade union movement.

"Eventually what I did when we kept on having these regular lunch meetings, I said, do you want to set up a committee, because we can, we can set up a Black Members Working Group in the union because it's clear to me that there's lots of people here that aren't happy. So I went through all the complaints and I said, we can do this on an individual basis, but that's not going to work. I said I've already been to personnel and let them know this is what's happening, but we actually need a formal mechanism that we can take to personnel.

What do you think about it? Some people disappeared quickly. that was fine. I'd rather they did that than sabotaged. The other people said yes, let's do this. And that's how I formed the black members group in the union and we were the first kind of people under the equality strand that formed the group." Lorna Campbell

Speakers include:

Maureen Loxley MBE
Wilf Sullivan
Amarjite Singh
Lorna Campbell
Micky Nicholas
Taranjit Chana
Elizabeth Cameron

Video recordings for each interviewee are currently in the process of being made available. In the meantime, we have uploaded the transcripts. 

If you would like to view the video recordings, please contact us specialcollections@londonmet.ac.uk 

The project group includes the TUC Library, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (UK), the TUC and Decolonising Arts Institute at the University of the Arts.