1. Someone at the TUC has calculated how much hot air the conference emits. According to this year’s Congress guide, the four day event will produce about 70 tonnes of carbon dioxide. But over the past two years the TUC has been trying to find ways to reduce and offset its carbon footprint.

2. This is the fifth consecutive year that delegates have travelled to Brighton for the TUC. It will be back again next year, and again in 2010, but subject to finding a suitable venue, the general council has decided that it must take place somewhere in the North in 2009. Conferences usually take place in seaside resorts as they tend to have suitable hotel accommodation and venues, but have previously visited Manchester, Bradford, Dublin, Dundee and Douglas on the Isle of Man.

3. A century ago when delegates gathered at the Assembly Rooms in Bath for the 1907 Trades Union Congress, there were a total of 236 trade unions, compared with just 60 this year. But the combined membership of affiliated unions was just 1.7 million in 1907 compared with nearly 7 million today.

4. This year’s TUC saw the conference debut of the union movement’s largest organisation – Unite, created by the merger of the TGWU and Amicus and claiming some 2 million members – and the disappearance of its smallest. The Sheffield Wool Shear Workers once appeared in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s smallest trade union, and had just 11 members when it was dissolved earlier this year.

5. When the TUC ran an equality audit on trade unions this year, it found that the great majority (85%) have statistical records on the proportion of women members, but fewer than half (42%) know how many black members they have. Just one affiliate, family court and probation staff union NAPO, was able to say how many transgender members it had – seven, or 0.14% of those answering the questionnaire.

6. When a big conference such as the TUC comes to town, it brings economic benefits in the form of delegates’ spending power. But when the TUC descended on Birmingham for its second Congress in 1869, it almost bankrupted the city’s trades council. It was not until September 1870 that local trade union branches succeeded in paying the full £5 charged for the meeting rooms.

7. The first woman president of the TUC was Dame Anne Loughlin of the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers, who took the chair for the 1943 Congress in Southport.

8. The TUC first passed a resolution seeking equal pay for men and women at its 1888 conference. The resolution was moved by Clementina Black, secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League. Black was born in Brighton, where her father was town clerk, and died there in 1922 – a year that the TUC itself was not taking place there (it was in Southport).

9. The only year in which the Trades Union Congress has not met since its launch in 1868 was in 1914 – when its planned conference was somewhat overtaken by the outbreak of the first world war. Its subsequent Congress in 1915 was the first to be addressed by a Cabinet minister – the munitions minister David Lloyd George.

10. This year’s TUC president, Alison Shepherd, is the third woman in a row to hold the post – and only the third in the TUC’s 140-year history not to be a full-time union official. She trained as a cartographer and now works as an administrator at Middlesex University.

Below: The TUC parliamentary committee (now known as the general council) in 1916. It would be another 40 years before there was a woman president.