The decision to turn his back on a career in stockbroking was to prove momentous for Reid. By opting to take up an apprenticeship in engineering he was catapulted almost from the outset into the heady world of industrial politics. Industry was a university of sorts where the lecturing staff was made up of ‘philosophers in overalls’: self-taught men who were incredibly well-read and mainly communist in outlook. Reid himself opined that ‘all the best shop stewards were communists’. Indeed, Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) members made up 50 per cent of the delegates during the Second World War at Party congresses, and it remained high at 30 per cent in the 1960s. All were ‘class one’ or ‘time served’ men. Contrary to the received image of the hard-line, intolerant and sectarian image of communists, those encountered by him gave ‘every indication of being open minded and tolerant. Anyway, I was quite impressed by them. They were not the dogmatists I had anticipated’. Thus, under the tutelage of these workplace philosophers, Reid began his fledgling career as a young communist activist.

His working life in industry began in 1950 when he found himself the only apprentice in the tool room of a small firm called Scottish Precision Castings (SPC) based in Hillington, Glasgow. Even as an apprentice, Reid remained cossetted by his mother. Few apprentices left for work wearing a coat warmed on the door of the range by their mother. ‘His mother always put his pieces (sandwiches) in his pocket in case he forgot them’. The fact that as a Catholic Reid had been able to acquire an engineering apprenticeship was remarkable, as sectarianism in the west of Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s still played an important role in determining one’s life chances. Unspoken embargoes still existed on employing Catholics in occupations as diverse as banking, the fire service, quantity surveying, as well as, of course, shipbuilding and engineering. Alex Ferry, later president of the AEU, highlighted the way in which religion could maintain craft exclusiveness, recalling as a young Catholic male in the 1940s that: