Skip to main content
George Jerrom: ‘the best general secretary print never had’
Remembering a working-class communist intellectual, internationalist and giant of the union movement in the print industry
George Jerrom

GEORGE JERROM, former national officer of the National Graphical Association (NGA) and its successor the Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU), was a leading communist working in print and the print unions.

A long-time member of the Communist Party, secretary of the party’s print advisory committee, his influence and experience earned him support from fellow trade unionists, printers and journalists.

A warm, approachable man with a brilliant ability to dissect problems, he had a major influence on some of print’s defining industrial disputes during the 1980s.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
Protesters outside the main gate of Rupert Murdoch's News International plant at Wapping, East London, January 25, 1986
Workers' Rights / 24 January 2026
24 January 2026

JOHN LANG recalls how Murdoch used scabbing electricians and even devised a fake newspaper to force a confrontation with printers – then sacked them all

News International Print plant at Wapping, East London, January 23, 1986
Workers' Rights / 24 January 2026
24 January 2026

Forty years on, TONY DUBBINS revisits the Wapping dispute to argue that Murdoch’s real aim was union-busting – enabled by Thatcherite laws, police violence, compliant unions and a complicit media

SOGAT general secretary Brenda Dean (third from left) points to a poster condemning the owner of News International Mr Rupert Murdoch for his action against the print unions, February 11, 1986
Working Class History / 24 January 2026
24 January 2026

Enduring myths blame print unions for their own destruction – but TONY BURKE argues that the Wapping dispute was a calculated assault by Murdoch on organised labour, which reshaped Britain’s media landscape and casts a long shadow over trade union rights today

Wilfred Willett and his seminal Birds of Britain / Pic of Willett Country Standard
History / 19 December 2025
19 December 2025

A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction