Maria Ludkin
Maria Ludkin (born in 1965) was a lawyer for the GMB Trade Union, the third biggest union in the United Kingdom. She speaks frequently in relation to prominent GMB campaigns. In particular some of the less well known impacts of private equity on the economy and employment, which led to the calling of Treasury Select Committee hearings, and in relation to redundancies at Marks and Spencer. She has been involved in major GMB campaigns regarding proposed Remploy closures, equal pay, the Swindon hospital workers dispute and construction industry blacklisting, where litigation led to historic compensation payments. In 2016  GMB ran a test case establishing that Uber drivers were in fact workers with employment rights, rather than self-employed, as Uber claimed. As one of the first major cases testing the proliferation of bogus self-employment and loss of employment rights in the so-called "gig economy", the case has been called "the employment law case of the decade". Ludkin speaks regularly at conferences regarding shareholder activism, the impact of financial deregulation, as well as developments in good corporate governance and corporate social responsibility and the impact on labour of the gig economy. In May 2014, the GMB and  the Communication Workers Union launched the first trade union owned law firm in the country, UnionLine, to provide a legal service for almost one million trade union members and their families. She was a director of that award-winning firm. She is a member of the oversight board of the ESG Institute. In 2018, she was named in The Lawyers' "Hot 100" which seeks to recognise the best lawyers in the country. Previously Ludkin was a lawyer in the art world for ten years working for Christie's in London and New York., as well as working with a range  of significant technology firms during their early growth in Silicon Valley. In March 2018, Maria became chief counsel at Waveoptics, a market leader in hardware components for the AR industry.