Dave Spooner, a life-long trade unionist and former WIEGO Team member, passed away on March 20, 2025. Dave had a particular passion for workers’ education and was elected to the Board of WIEGO at the General Assembly in Durban, South Africa in 2006, as one of the representatives of the development practitioners’ constituency. At that point, he was working for the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations (IFWEA).
He was instrumental in WIEGO’s development: ten years on from WIEGO’s founding, he helped register and establish WIEGO as a legal entity in the United Kingdom and set up our first office in Manchester. In 2007, Dave was appointed as the first Operations Manager of the newly established WIEGO office.
Dave served as Operations Manager until 2010, helping to win WIEGO’s first grants as a UK organization and leading on a project to support street vendors in Monrovia, Liberia. Thereafter, he continued to work as a consultant to WIEGO, writing a manual, with Celia Mather on how to promote the rights of homeworkers in South Asia, and an Organizing Brief on the successful campaign of the Home-Based Workers’ Association of Bulgaria for the ratification of ILO Convention 177.
In the meantime, Dave was also running the Global Labour Institute (GLI), from an office just across the corridor from us in the Royal Exchange building in Manchester. He continued to do so, until retiring from this role at the end of February of this year. In recent years, the GLI worked alongside the International Transport Workers’ Federation to improve the working conditions of informal transport workers in cities where new, donor-funded rapid transit schemes have displaced jobs.
As well as working in the labour movement, Dave was also a committed member of Unite the Union and served more than one term as the Chair of the Community, Youth and Not-for-Profit branch in Manchester. Through his leadership, the branch signed an agreement with the city council to collaboratively ensure that labour standards were upheld by organizations contracted in to provide services.
Dave led the recruitment process that led to my hiring as WIEGO’s Operations Manager in 2010 and inducted me into the role. He has been a consistent source of support and wise counsel and, when I needed a home for five months at the start of 2018, Dave and his wife Elaine welcomed me into their household (albeit mostly because they were incapable of getting the right bin out for collection on the right day!).
I can’t believe he’s gone…
Mike Davice Bird
Operations Director, WIEGO