Jimmy Reid

James "Jimmy" Reid (9 July 1932 – 10 August 2010) was a Scottish trade union activist, orator, politician, and journalist born in Govan, Glasgow. His role as spokesman and one of the leaders in the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in between June 1971 and October 1972 attracted international recognition. He later served as Rector of the University of Glasgow and subsequently became a journalist and broadcaster. Formerly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Reid was later a Labour Party member. After supporting the Scottish Socialist Party in the late 1990s he joined the Scottish National Party in 2005 and fully supported Scottish independence. He died in 2010 after a long illness.

Reid was born in Govan, Glasgow, then a major British shipbuilding centre. In his youth, Reid joined the Young Communist League and was later a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was involved in organising a major apprentices' strike at the Clyde shipyards in 1951.

Reid came to prominence in the early 1970s when he led the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in to try to stop Edward Heath's Conservative government from closing down the shipyards on the River Clyde. The government had decided that the shipyards should operate without state subsidy, which would have resulted in at least six thousand job losses. An engineer by trade and shop steward of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, Reid, along with his colleagues Jimmy Airlie, Sammy Gilmore and Sammy Barr, decided that the best way to show the viability of keeping the yards open was by staging a 'work-in' rather than by going on strike. This meant that the workers would continue to complete what orders the shipyard had until the government changed policy.

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