Japanese prisoner-of-war-camps, and then guarded captured Japanese. On demobilisation in 1947, he returned home and worked in the Labour Party (UK) for his local MP, the Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Todd became a gas fitter in Walthamstow, but then in 1955 he went to the new Ford plant to work as an engineer. During his working days on the Ford assembly line at Dagenham, his elder brother was a supervisor while Ron remained a shopfloor "spanner-and-screwdriver" man on the line before becoming deputy convenor of Ford shop stewards. He joined the Transport and General Workers' Union. Trade union career and politics Not long after starting work at the Ford plant Todd became a shop steward and soon deputy convener of shop stewards. In 1962, he became a full-time T&G officer based at the Edmonton office and was responsible for chemical, engineering and metal groups. The General Secretary of the T&G, Jack Jones, moved Todd to the Stratford office, so that he could take charge of the interests of workers at the Dagenham plant. Todd was made Regional Secretary for London and the South-East in 1975 and responsible for half a million or more members. He became friendly with Moss Evans, then responsible for the motor industry and who succeeded Jones in 1978 as General Secretary. Evans appointed Todd as National Organiser, at the centre of the T&G high command. Todd became a household name as the officer in charge of the Ford pay negotiations at the end of the Callaghan government in the autumn of 1978. He won a 17 per cent pay rise for workers, much greater than the Government's pay raise norm of 5 per cent. Callaghan was faced with a Commons vote of confidence in the Government's pay policy. Evans and Todd believed that they were correct to put the interests of their members before the entreaties of Labour ministers. Todd was adamant that the function of trade unions is to negotiate on behalf of their members and that it was Labour ministers by their actions who had destroyed the Labour government, and not the trade unions, in the aftermath of the Winter of Discontent, 1978–79. Todd had assumed that National Organiser would be his last job and that he would retire at the same moment as Moss Evans, however Evans gave up due to ill-health and retired to King's Lynn in Norfolk, persuading Todd to stand