Derek Robinson (trade Unionist) - Career

Career

Robinson was born in 1927, and began work in the motor industry as an apprentice during the Second World War. He was soon to become a member of the British Communist Party and the Amalgamated Engineering Union or AEU. He stood as a Communist candidate in four consecutive General Elections in Birmingham, Northfield between 1966 and 1974, but lost his deposit on each occasion, only managing to receive over 1% of the vote on one occasion, in 1966.

British Leyland was the result of a series of mergers between different British automobile 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 Ethridge. With his network of representatives in the 42 different BL plants around the country, he led a long-running campaign of strikes around the BL empire which he argued were in protest at mismanagement.

In 1975, BL went bankrupt and was nationalised by the Government. In 1977 a new managing director, Sir 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 Ethridge, 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.