John Hughes obituary

John Hughes founded Ruskin College’s Trade Union Investigation Unit, which presented sophisticated breakdowns of the basis of workers’ shell out claims

For far more than three decades, John Hughes, who has died aged 86, was based at Ruskin College in Oxford, finishing as principal (1979-89). He place his substantial assortment of capabilities at the services of the labour motion as an modern educator, a resourceful utilized economist and an influential participant in a lot of commissions and councils on industrial matters.

John was a passionate believer in a fairer financial program. He sought greater wages and circumstances for doing work folks on the basis of reasoned argument backed up by rigorous analysis.

A prolific writer, generating the two pragmatic Fabian pamphlets and tracts for Spokesman Books on workers’ management, he succeeded as a teacher in encouraging his college students to attain far past their authentic horizons. As the leading residential labour-movement university, Ruskin took working-class students, especially trade unionists. John launched task function, set up a labour scientific studies program, and devised and taught new innovative programs for senior trade union officials.

In the 1960s, John helped the Trades Union Congress set up its yearly Financial Review, presenting an alternative viewpoint on economic approach. He was the founder of Ruskin’s Trade Union Investigation Unit, which presented sophisticated breakdowns of the basis of pay claims, in 1970. The document he created that 12 months for the Ford automobile workers’ shell out claim, linking the total financial cycle, profitability and the ability to increase wages, reportedly located a readership that for once extended to the City of London.

The guide that John edited with Roy Moore, A Particular Situation?: Social Justice and the Miners (1972), arguably represented the high-water mark of this variety of analytical perform in industrial relations. Collective bargaining, frequently tense and intensely political, also concerned real exchange of argued situations, and John created key contributions to these.

As deputy chairman of the Price Commission (1977-79), he acknowledged the effect of raging inflation by insisting on a housewife becoming appointed as an adviser. This dedication to the cause of consumers in a fairer financial technique led him to sit on the Nationwide Client Council (1982-94), and then on the Rail Passengers Council (2001-05).

In this, he was a defender of the interests of men and women like his father, a milkman, and his mom, who entered service at the age of 12. Born in London, he invested the blitz many years billeted on the south coast, exactly where he developed his lifelong passion for cycling. I don’t forget him in Edinburgh in the 1990s, carrying his bike up a lot of flights of stairs to the flat that he and his wife, Vi, shared in the Old Town.

A scholarship boy at Westminster City school, he went to Lincoln University, Oxford, and in 1948 graduated in politics and economics. In 1949 he joined the international youth brigade rebuilding the Samac-Sarajevo railway line in Yugoslavia. There he met Vi, and they married later on that yr she had sturdy Scottish roots, and he rather looser Welsh ones.

John started his profession in adult training as an extramural tutor, moving from Scunthorpe (for Hull University) to Sheffield, and then to Ruskin. Before his period as principal, he was tutor in economics and industrial relations (1957-70) and vice-principal (1970-79). In the course of the 1980s Ruskin faced challenging instances, specifically as the romantic relationship in between government and trade unions grew to become acrimonious. In 1986, a Ruskin tutor, David Selbourne, contributed a controversial political post to the Times, against the background of the dispute among the print unions and the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch. College students boycotted Selbourne’s lectures, although he maintained that Ruskin was not defending his academic freedom and at some point left. An inquiry later led to modifications in the college’s governing body and disciplinary procedures, and a new statement on academic freedom.

John and Vi, herself a literature tutor at Ruskin (1961-82), had been endlessly hospitable and intellectually curious. Family members debates involving their 4 daughters, Kirsty, Katherine, Nicola and Stella, were the two energetic and various. Vi predeceased John by two weeks, and he is survived by their daughters, four grandchildren and 4 wonderful-grandchildren.

• John Dennis Hughes, economist and instructor, born 28 January 1927 died one November 2013

John Hughes obituary