My friend Sammy Morris, who has died aged 77, was a factory worker and later a care assistant. His socialist principles guided him throughout his life, not least in the kind of jobs he took on and in the union activity he undertook at his various workplaces.
After being employed in factories supplying the shipyards of the Glasgow area from the age of 15, Sammy became a member of CND, where he found out about the Factory for Peace in Govan, and joined up. A workers’ co-op, it was based on the premise that it would not make any goods that could be used directly for the purposes of war, with any profits going to charities working in developing countries.
Around the same time Sammy signed up with the International Socialists, later to become the Socialist Workers Party. He worked at the Factory for a number of years until he discovered that some of the night-store heaters it manufactured were being sold to the Ministry of Defence. As a result he left, and became a pipe-fitter’s mate at Drake and Scull, a firm of heating engineers, until, in 1971, he found a job in the Laird’s box-making factory at Uddingston, on the eastern outskirts of Glasgow.
Sammy soon became the senior shop steward there, representing the print union Sogat, and he also played an active part in the national union’s activities. Laird’s was near to a Caterpillar tractor factory and when in 1987 the workers there occupied the premises for 103 days in defence of jobs, Sammy was at the forefront of local initiatives to support them.
He took early retirement from Laird’s in 1994 for medical reasons and, after attending Langside College in Glasgow to gain a certificate in social care, he worked first with vulnerable people as a befriender for Glasgow city council and then as a care assistant in a council-run dementia day care centre until he was 72. He was known for his humour as well as his activism – his jokes and observations tended to be on the Chic Murray or Tommy Cooper side of comedy – and he kept the people in the home laughing.
Sammy was active in the Unite union’s long-running campaign for equal pay for 19,000 women who had worked for Glasgow council, and a £770m claim was settled last year. When he retired in 2019 he joined Unite’s retired members branch and helped many of its members to claim attendance allowance or other welfare benefits to which they were not aware they were entitled.
He was born in Kinning Park, Glasgow, to George and Margaret Morris (nee Gibson), and grew up in Pollok. He married Rena McEwan in 1968 and they caused a local sensation, Sammy being from a Protestant family and Rena a Catholic.
They separated and divorced in 1990. Five years later he married Alison Brougham.
He is survived by Alison, his children, Sean and Julie, from his first marriage, his sister, Anna, and his grandson, Emerik.
