Trade unionist Sir Gavin Laird, 84

Sir Gavin Laird, who has died aged 84, was a long-serving trade union leader with the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (previously the AUEW and AEU and a forerunner of Unite), which had at its peak some 1.2 million members.

Unlike many of the firebrand union leaders of his time, Sir Gavin was a moderate figure, who was appointed CBE under Mrs Thatcher’s government and knighted during Tony Blair’s; he sought to manage the diminution of union power after the 1970s by dialogue with companies, and to preserve his members’ interests by negotiation.

In 1986, he addressed the conference of the Confederation of British Industry – a highly unusual move for a union leader at the time (the miners’ strike had been bitterly running during the previous two years).

Sir Gavin was also, later, to be the first major union leader to back state funding for ballots and single-union agreements with employers, an approach that led to calls for the AEU’s expulsion from the Trades Union Congress.

Such actions ensured that he was seen by private industry as a man with whom they could work productively.

This applied not just to the relations between the AEU and employers, but to Sir Gavin’s personal appointments: he had periods serving as a director of, among others, the Bank of England, the Arts Council, the Armed Forces Pay Review Board and Scottish Television, and served on the council of Strathclyde Business School.

He served on the TUC General Council, the Scottish Development Association, the board of Brittania Life and the Edinburgh Investment Trust, GEC Scotland, the Forestry Commission and was an honorary DLitt of Keele and Heriot Watt universities.

He was appointed CBE in 1988 and knighted in 1995.

Sir Gavin Laird grew up in Clydebank.