Dave Penman
Dave Penman is a Scottish trade union leader.
Penman began working as an administrative assistant for the Inland Revenue in Cumbernauld at the age of eighteen. In 1986, he transferred to the Department of Work and Pensions, where he became an executive officer. He soon became active in the National Union of Civil and Public Servants, and from 1992 represented it on the general council of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, the first person to hold the "young workers" seat on the council.
In 1995, Penman began working full-time for the NUCPS as an organiser, then in 2000 he transferred to the FDA union, where he served as national officer. From 2002, he was the union's head of operations, and in 2011 he became its deputy general secretary. He was elected as the union's general secretary in 2012. On election, he said that "you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between myself and Jonathan in terms of our approach to trade unionism", and identified the union's key challenge as maintaining pay and conditions to prevent a brain drain from the senior civil service. He was re-elected in 2016 for a further five-year term. Since September 2012, he had also served on the General Council of the Trades Union Congress.
In his spare time, Penman supports Partick Thistle F.C. and enjoys crime fiction and the theatre.
