James Larkin Jones CH MBE (29 March 1913 – 21 April 2009), known as Jack Jones, was a British trade union leader and General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union 1968-1978.

Jones was born in Garston, Liverpool, Lancashire. He was named after the Liverpool-born Irish trade unionist James Larkin. He left school at 14 and worked as an engineering apprentice. After the Wall Street crash, Jones lost his job, eventually finding employment with a firm of signmakers and painters. He then joined his father as a Liverpool docker.

Jack Jones was converted to socialism by reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, and he later explained how the book "was passed from hand to hand among people in the Labour movement and had a remarkable effect on our thinking". He became a member of the Transport and General Workers Union, and was elected shop steward, then a delegate on the National Docks Group Committee.

Strongly opposed to the British Union of Fascists and their leader Oswald Mosley, Jones organised protest-meetings against the fascists in Liverpool, and was beaten by a group of Blackshirts armed with knuckle-dusters. A member of the Territorial Army since 1934 (he was promoted to bombardier in the Royal Artillery), in 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Jones joined and served with the British Battalion of the XV International Brigade as the political commissar of the Major Attlee Company, and was seriously wounded at the Battle of the Ebro in 1938. Prior to the battle, Jones met a delegation of students, including future Prime Minister Edward Heath, who were sympathetic to the republican cause.

On his return to Britain, Jones became a full-time official of the TGWU in Coventry. Jones played a key role in organising the workforce of the West Midlands motor industry in the postwar period as Regional Secretary of the TGWU. He was a strong supporter of the shop steward movement aimed at promoting trade union and industrial democracy. He was an early supporter of the Institute for Workers' Control. While Assistant General Secretary of the union and a member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, he chaired the Labour Party policy group on Industrial Democracy.

Jones was elected General Secretary of the TGWU in 1968. Together with Hugh Scanlon, President of the Amalgamated Engineering Union he led the left-wing trade union opposition (associated with Broad Left) to the 1966–70 Labour Government's prices and incomes policy, and the efforts of that government to introduce legislation that would have enforced a 28-day cooling off period before strike action could be taken.

In 1969 Home Secretary James Callaghan requested action that would hinder Jones's career, which was raised in cabinet, and further discussed with Secretary of State for Employment Barbara Castle. A plan for detrimental leaks to the media was placed in the Foreign Office propaganda Information Research Department, and its head prepared a briefing paper. However information about how this was effected has not been released under the thirty-year rule under a section of the Public Records Act permitting national security exemptions.

While general secretary, he was chief economic spokesman for the Trades Union Congress and one of the authors of the Social Contract. Jones was also instrumental in the creation of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) in 1975, and was a member of the National Economic Development Council from 1969 to 1978. Jones campaigned for Britain to leave the EEC in the 1975 referendum.