About Simon Dubbins
Simon’s story is the story of our union
Simon has supported reps and members to win, embodying the principles of international solidarity throughout his career. He has taken strike action himself and has a political record rooted in traditional socialist values, solidarity, and internationalism. Our union needs a new start, and as General Secretary, Simon will end divisions and focus on winning again.
Simon’s story begins on the picket lines of the great Wapping Dispute in 1986 against Rupert Murdoch's News International. As a teenager, Simon was on the picket line every week for over a year, witnessing Thatcher’s brutal attacks on our unions firsthand, even getting arrested when the police charged the picket line.
With nearly 30 years of experience in trade union activism, Simon first joined the Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU) in 1997, and in 2008, he became the International Director for Unite the Union.
Simon’s industrial focus has been on supporting reps in multinational companies, which employ well over half of Unite’s members. He has a proven record of negotiating, building international solidarity, winning disputes, and helping reps save sites from closure.
A long-time supporter of organizing, Simon played a major role in one of the first Leverage campaigns and coordinated international action after Austrian packaging company Mayr-Melnhof locked workers out in 2012.
Under Simon’s leadership, our union has become an international force for solidarity. Since 2008, he has coordinated the first transatlantic link between Unite and the United Steel Workers of North America, leading to joint efforts to win industrial disputes and support for causes like Cuban solidarity and Black Lives Matter.
Since 2015, Simon has worked tirelessly to support reps in developing just transition plans to save jobs. He built connections between Unite members in the North Sea and their counterparts in the Norwegian union for collaborative planning.
Simon has kept our union at the forefront of international solidarity work. He serves as the trade union movement’s officer for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and has a long history of building links with the Palestinian people, steadfastly campaigning against genocide in Gaza. He has also led our union’s support for campaigns advocating peace in Colombia and Kurdistan, as well as for South African workers’ access to HIV treatment.
Throughout his career, Simon has consistently challenged the far right, recognizing it as one of the most pressing political issues of our time. He supported workers at the Lindsey Oil Refinery in 2009 when the BNP attempted to hijack a strike, distributing multilingual material to promote industrial unity. In the wake of the Brexit Referendum, Simon developed and led the ‘Brexit on our Terms’ strategy to reunite a divided membership.
On an international scale, Simon has supported workers in Eastern Europe whose unions were being hijacked by the far right. He has learned from the experiences of unions in the US and Germany and has equipped Unite reps with new strategies to combat the far right in the workplace.
Simon has been a member of the Labour Party for nearly 30 years, placing our union before any political party. All politicians will be judged based on their support for our union, and Simon will ensure that members have a voice in the relationship between our union and the Labour Party.
Born into a union family, Simon currently lives in Bedford and is married with two grown-up children.
