Gerry Doherty
British trade unionist
Gerard Doherty (1953 – 3 September 2023) was a British trade unionist.
Based in Glasgow, Doherty worked for British Rail, and joined the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association (TSSA) in 1972. He soon became chairman of his branch of the union, and then became secretary of its Glasgow and West of Scotland Political Advisory Council. In 1988, he was elected to the union's executive committee, and then in 1991 he began working full-time for the union as its Irish secretary.
In 1995, Doherty returned to the UK as a divisional secretary for the union, working at its headquarters in London. He was elected as general secretary of the TSSA in 2004, pledging to keep it affiliated to the Labour Party and use those links to campaign on the ownership and integration of railways in the UK. He was also elected to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress.
Under Doherty's leadership, the TSSA entered into merger talks with the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, and Doherty took early retirement in 2011 in the hope of facilitating these.
In retirement, Doherty served as a director of South Central Youth, a charity aiming to dissuade young people in South London from joining gangs. In 2018, he was appointed a trustee of the Railways Pension Scheme, on the nomination of the TSSA.
In 2019 Doherty undertook a controversial report into industrial relations at Brighton and Hove City Council's Cityclean service, which was commissioned as part of the settlement terms after a ballot by the GMB in 2019 threatened an all-out strike over the weekend of Brighton Pride. Brighton and Hove City Council paid £44,100 for the report, which was discussed in a private council meeting in December 2019 and has never been made public.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q57242699. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 2023, 1972 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gerry Doherty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.