Derek Robinson (trade unionist)

Derek Robinson (1927–2017) was a British trade unionist. Formerly a convenor and shop steward within car manufacturer British Leyland for much of the 1970s, he was commonly known as "Red Robbo" in the British press.

Career

Robinson was born in Cradley, then in Worcestershire and began work in the motor industry as an apprentice at the Austin Motor Company in Longbridge during the Second World War, training as a tool maker. He soon became a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1951. He stood as a Communist candidate in four consecutive general elections in Birmingham, Northfield between 1966 and 1974.

British Leyland was the result of a series of mergers between different British motor vehicle manufacturers. By 1975, Robinson was the union convener of the Longbridge plant in Birmingham, having worked his way up from the shop floor to serve as the deputy of the previous convenor, Dick Etheridge, a fellow member of the Communist Party.

With his network of representatives in the 42 different Leyland plants around the country, he led a long-running campaign of strikes around the company, which he argued were in protest at mismanagement, leading 523 walkouts at Leyland's Birmingham plant during a 30-month period. In 1975, British Leyland became bankrupt and was nationalised by the Government. In 1977, a new managing director, Michael Edwardes, was appointed. He aimed to find a resolution to the ongoing industrial disputes and turn the company around. Robinson, for his part, supported the development of the policy of "participation", in which convenors and stewards would work together with company management.

Robinson had seen the idea of "participation" as central both to his political aims and to making British Leyland a success, stating: "If we make Leyland successful, it will be a political victory. It will prove that ordinary working people have got the intelligence and determination to run industry".

During the 1970s union organisation in British Leyland was split between the largely Communist Party-oriented stewards under Etheridge, and later Robinson, at Longbridge, and a smaller number of Trotskyist stewards based at the more militant Cowley plant. Many of the individual workers, however, took a more militant line than that espoused by the CP officials. An article by Frank Hughes in ''Workers' Liberty'' suggests that Robinson, by supporting the introduction of the "measured day work" system in place of piecework and by encouraging the adoption of "participation", in fact destroyed the relationship between stewards and the shop floor and left them unable to control unofficial strikes.

Relationship with the press, and sacking

The filmmaker Ken Loach suggested that Robinson was unfairly smeared by the press of the time; contrary to their depiction of him controlling strikes at will, Loach claimed, he in fact spent much of his time attempting to prevent unofficial strikes. This viewpoint was examined by Loach in part of an (untransmitted) documentary film series, ''Questions of Leadership'' (1983).

Margaret Thatcher later described Robinson in her memoirs as a "notorious agitator". Many years later, Robinson commented "The pressures were immense but were it not for the ideological understanding that I had, I could very well have ended up with a nervous breakdown".

A 2002 BBC
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