Worker backlash sank strike king
NICKNAMED Red Robbo due to his Left-wing views, Derek Robinson became one of the most famous trade unionists of the 1970s. As the shop stewards’ convener at British Leyland, he was responsible for no fewer than 523 walkouts at the car giant’s Longbridge plant in Birmingham in the late 70s.
During that period, dubbed the winter of discontent, the firm lost at least £200million in revenue as the unions embarked on a series of ruinous disputes with management over pay and conditions.
Having faced bankruptcy in 1975, been given a £2.4billion government bailout and nationalised by Harold Wilson, the last thing the car-making firm needed in its bid for survival was a firebrand like Robinson.
For a time, though, following the appointment of Michael Edwardes as chairman in 1977, it looked like the unions and management could work it out together as Edwardes implemented a survival plan for British Leyland’s future. But after it was announced that a further 25,000 workers would lose their jobs, after 18,000 had already been cut in 15 months, Robinson went on the attack. He put his name to a 16-page booklet, A Trade Union Response To The Edwardes Plan in which he urged British Leyland workers to oppose the proposals root and branch.
IT WAS to be his downfall and in late 1979 he was summarily dismissed. More than 18,000 workers immediately went on strike in protest at his sacking while the activist claimed that he was being singled out for opposing company policy in the past.
However a ballot on a strike in sympathy with Robinson and opposing the dismissal, resulted in an overwhelming defeat by 14,000 to just 600. The age of Red Robbo as a political and industrial force to be reckoned with was over.
Born in 1927 in Cradley Heath, Staffordshire – exact date unknown – Robinson left school early at 14 to become an apprentice toolmaker at the Longbridge plant where it was noted that he asked “a devil of a lot of questions”.
He latched on to long-serving convener Dick Etheridge who introduced him to the Communist Party, which Robinson joined in 1951 and remained a member of until being expelled in the 1990s.
He rose up through the Longbridge hierarchy, becoming a shop steward of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), then, in 1974, works convenor, a position that gave him the opportunity to indulge his tastes for politically motivated rebellion.
While at British Leyland he stood, unsuccessfully, as a Communist candidate in four General Elections in Birmingham, Northfield, between 1966 and 1974, but lost his deposit on each occasion. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he was a tutor in trades union studies and served as chairman of the Communist Party.
Despite being branded a “notorious agitator” by former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in her memoirs, Robinson was unrepentant. “I can sleep sound at night because I never betrayed the workers I was elected to represent,” he once said.
He was married three times.