My friend Steve Davison, who has died aged 71, was chair of the executive council of the Amicus trade union from 2003 to 2007.
He also played a key role in the creation of the first global union, Workers Uniting, which consists of Amicus, with 1.2 million members, and the 800,000 strong United Steelworkers of the USA and Canada. In addition he was influential in the formation of the UKs biggest union, Unite, through a merger in 2007 between Amicus and the TGWU.
During his time in those high-level union roles Steve worked as a tutor at the Trade Union Studies Centre in Bradford, which he ended up running for a number of years until its closure.
Steve was born in Alston, Cumbria, to James, a car mechanic, and Audrey (nee Fawcett), a district nurse. He attended Samuel King’s school in Alston and then left Cumbria in 1973 to study history and politics at Bradford University.
Settling in West Yorkshire afterwards, his first job was an engineer at Anderton International, a Bradford engineering company, where he met Diane Maude, who worked on the production line there. They were married in 1980.
Having joined the engineers’ union, AEU, he soon stepped up to be a shop steward and then a factory convener, while also becoming active in the Labour party and Trades Council in Keighley.
In the mid-1980s he was made redundant by Anderton, and ended up on an employment blacklist due to his trade union activities – a common experience in those days in the engineering and construction industries. As a result he took various poorly paid short term jobs, including office work in London, before finding a post at the Trade Union Studies Centre in Bradford, where he taught basic courses for union members as well as higher level diploma units for union reps.
By the 90s he was also running the centre. After it closed in 2015 due to funding cuts, he took on freelance tutoring work for individual unions who had their own education programmes, and he also did some teaching on international courses, notably with unions from Norway.
A committed internationalist, Steve visited Bangladesh for Amicus and Workers Uniting, helping shipbreakers there to unionise and to improve their dangerous working conditions. As part of visiting Amicus delegations he addressed the Venezuelan parliament in 2017 and met the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, in 2008.
He is survived by Diane, their children, Jennie and James, three grandchildren and his sisters Val and Judith.
