Jayaben Desai and the Grunwick dispute

Racism and resistance

The story starts with Britain's colonial past. Many of the striking workers in the Grunwick dispute were women of South Asian descent, whose families had settled in countries in East Africa during British colonial rule.

For years, British policy had employed a ‘divide and rule’ strategy to maintain control over the region, deliberately emphasizing and exploiting ethnic and social divisions between Black and South Asian communities to suppress opposition. When Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda gained independence from Britain in the 1970s, the influence of colonialism remained. Thousands of South Asian people were forced to flee as a result.

Having been born in territories under colonial rule or in independent countries like India, these South Asian migrants were considered British citizens and entitled to settle in the United Kingdom. Some of the factory owners in the UK supported the arrival of this new workforce and the economic benefits of their cheap labour. Britain’s far right, however, did not.

The National Front, a fascist political party, was on the rise in the 1970s and blamed migration for the growing unemployment and housing crisis. South Asian communities faced a wave of violence, including the racist murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar, an eighteen-year-old Sikh engineering student, in Southall in 1976 – the same year that the Grunwick strike began.

The decade marked a significant period of resistance in Britain. Black and Asian youth movements struggled against racism on the streets, just as South Asian women were driven to activism at the factories.

Pay and conditions at Grunwick

Workers at Grunwick Film Processing Laboratory faced ‘… poor pay, long hours, aggressive supervision, petty restrictions and penalties imposed on the workers’, according to evidence submitted by Tom Durkin, chair of Brent Trades Council, to the Court of Inquiry into the industrial dispute.

• From our collection

  LAB 10/3923/2

  Title

  Written evidence from the Court of Inquiry into the Grunwick dispute (part 2)

  Date

  1977

At the time, Brent had about 25% of London’s manufacturing industry, making the borough attractive for ‘unemployed and immigrant people’ who were exploited for ‘relatively unskilled labour’. This was in spite of the fact that from 1966 to 1974, no less than 17,000 manufacturing jobs had been lost there.

The Political and Economic Planning (P.E.P.) Report on racial disadvantage in Britain, a research project carried out between 1972 and 1975, highlighted how race affected workers' earnings and job opportunities:

… minority groups… are concentrated within the lower job levels in a way that cannot be explained by lower academic job qualifications…

... within broad categories or jobs they have lower earnings than whites… the jobs are intrinsically badly paid.

Extract from the P.E.P. Report. Catalogue reference: LAB 10/3923/2

Gender and culture played a role in workers’ treatment too. Enduring stereotypes, dating back to the history of Western colonialism and imperialism, led employers to view South Asian women in terms of oppression. Colonial social constructs of power – that persist today – cast the women as submissive and hardworking.

The women of the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratory, however, knew their worth – and their rights – and demanded better.

Jayaben Desai

The Grunwick dispute was initiated by Jayaben Desai, a Gujarati woman born in India in 1933. Mrs Desai and her family migrated from Tanzania to Britain in 1967, where she took up low-paid work at the Grunwick factory after it put out leaflets in the local community.

Following the unfair dismissal of a young co-worker, Mrs Desai’s hard work moved outside the walls of Grunwick, where she would lead a passionate campaign that drew attention to the plight of immigrant workers, advocating for change and shaping industrial relations in the UK.

From: P.J. Rawal

To: The Manager, Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories Ltd

Date: 12 July 1976

Dear Sir,

I joined the Finishing Dept on 3rd May, 1976 and my service has been terminated by Mr Holden as from today.

However, I wish that he will reconsider the decision and take me back in the service as he has not taken following points in consideration.

1) It was the first time that I did not come to work and that is also because there was difficulty getting to work in time.

2) My husband tried to get in touch with me but unfortunately the person he tried to get to inform me was having another appointment and cannot come to tell me to go to work even late. I have no phone in my house.

3) Mr Reccaid lied when he told my husband that there is too much work and all will leave at 7.00. p.m. Actually the dept closed at 5.30. So I presume there wasn’t pressure of work.

4) I had still the weakness of my recent sickness and was unable to take half-an-hour walk. My husband drops me to work, but on Friday the time was inconvenient for him to take me to work by car.

I hope you will reconsider your decision which seems to be too harshly taken to under misunderstanding.

However in case even after this plea if you are still holding up your principle please let me have my due pay and P60 form to my above mentioned address… I also wish to have in writing the reason why my service has been terminated.

Thanking you,

Yours faithfully,

Rawal

The Court of Inquiry's report on the dispute set the scene: ‘On Friday 20 August 1976 the dog days were making themselves felt, the air-conditioning plant recently installed at the company’s new premises in Chapter Road was not yet in operation… and it was the company’s busiest period of the year’.

• From our collection

  PREM 16/1491

  Title

  Court of Inquiry Report into the Grunwick dispute

  Date

  August 1977

Devshi Bhudia, aged 19, had become discontented with pay and conditions at the factory. He expressed his resentment at being put in charge of some three or four student workers – if he was to be in charge, he wanted more money. After discussing his concerns with the supervisor of the mail order department, Mr Bhudia was dismissed. He left and the student workers walked out with him in solidarity, remaining outside the factory until 7pm.

An ‘underlying tension and a sense of grievance’ filled the hot summer air. Mrs Desai wanted to go home, but the assistant manager said he had some more work for her. Long hours with compulsory overtime were a ‘cardinal feature’ of the terms and conditions of employment at Grunwick. Mrs Desai protested to the supervisor and walked out of his office. Her son joined her, and they made their way into the street, where they met Mr Bhudia and his friends. ‘She suggested there and then that they needed a union’.

‘Strikers in saris’

On the morning of Monday 23 August 1976, the Desais, Mr Bhudia and his friends, and a few others, stood with placards outside the factory gates. Over the weekend they had decided to canvass support among their fellow workers for a union – and over 200 workers walked out. ‘The strikers were calling upon those who were inside to come out and join them’. A total of 137 workers on strike were sacked.

Grunwick Laboratories Workers Action Committee

Fellow Workers,

You will be aware that during the last month, many workers have joined the Transport & General Workers’ Union. The right to join a trade union of one’s choice is a basic right and the right of every worker.

Management’s reaction to workers joining the Union has been to harass workers and intimidate them. They have sacked workers and seem determined to insist on treating their employees as sub-humans with no rights of representation to discuss legitimate grievances.

Our fight for recognition and better conditions today – is yours tomorrow!

Join us today – join the T. & G. W. U.

Issued on behalf of the Grunwick Laboratories Workers Action Committee

They began their search for a union and a meeting was arranged at the Brent Trades and Labour Hall. By the end of the week, 91 permanent staff on strike were members of the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff (APEX). It was decided to produce a strike bulletin. The first was published on 31 August and was followed by further issues at regular intervals (you can see the second bulletin here).

By 2 September, the union had declared the strike official at a national level, concluding that industrial action was needed if the union was to achieve what it now sought – the recognition of the union as a bargaining agent, and an improvement in the pay and conditions for employees working at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratory.

After Jayaben Desai and her co-workers spent months picketing outside the factory, it was obvious that the strike, left to itself, would achieve nothing. APEX therefore enlisted the support of the trade union movement as a whole to help fight ‘a reactionary employer taking advantage of race and employing workers on disgraceful terms and conditions'. One strike bulletin quotes the Managing Director of Grunwick, George Ward, as saying, ‘I can buy a Patel for £15 anytime’. ‘You can smell the chapatis from here’, said another director.

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The Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) instructed all its members not to handle Grunwick’s mail. The ‘blacking’ of the mail came into effect following a meeting of 350 delegates from the London Regional Committee of the UPW, who decided unanimously to fully support Post Office workers who refused to handle the company’s mail.

Among others, the National Union of Mineworkers and Arthur Scargill, who led the 1984–1985 miners’ strike, brought the Grunwick dispute to the attention of the public and the media. He and other miners from across the country joined the pickets at the factory in a show of solidarity with the South Asian women – dubbed the ‘strikers in saris’ by the press. On that day in November 1977, 8,000 people turned out to protest, leading to a heavy police presence and violence. Scargill himself and 112 others were arrested, while 243 picketers were treated for injuries.

Trade union response

Despite these mass pickets and boycotts, the Grunwick's management refused to engage in mediation.

They had already rejected the findings of the Court of Inquiry Report back in August. Commissioned by the Labour government and chaired by Lord Scarman, the inquiry had heard evidence from the factory workers and directors and made recommendations directed towards resolving the Grunwick dispute.

67 The company by dismissing all the strikers, refusing to consider the reinstatement of any of them, refusing to seek a negotiated settlement to the strike and rejecting ACAS offers of conciliation, has acted within the letter but outside the spirit of the law. Further, such action on the part of the company was unreasonable when judged by the norms of good industrial relations practice. The company has thus added to the bitterness of the dispute, and contributed to its development into a threat of civil disorder.

The report found that Grunwick had acted 'within the letter but outside the spirit of the law' and recommended that they offer re-employment to all those strikers who were full time employees of the company before the dispute (and wished to be taken back). They also recommended that the company should accept the right of an individual employee to be a member of and represented by the union.

Regardless, Grunwick management refused to recognise that the strikers had joined a union, and refused to give them permission to do so.

Both the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and APEX felt frustrated by the seemingly indefinite prolongation of the dispute and wanted to withdraw their support. In protest, Jayaben Desai and some fellow workers went on hunger strike outside the TUC headquarters. When this could not change the unions’ mind, however, the strike was brought to a disappointing end.

A lasting legacy

Although the outcome of the Grunwick dispute was a negative one, the lasting impact of the ‘strikers in saris’ is anything but. The strike was a critical moment for migrant workers across the United Kingdom, raising important questions about race and gender within the trade union movement, and capturing some of the greatest scenes of working-class solidarity in its history.

Workers, although they are the overwhelming majority in our society are also greatly disadvantaged with respect to employers. An individual worker has no power to exert upon an employer. Only when acting collectively and being organised when the situation demands can working people defend and advance their working conditions and standards. Experience over centuries has taught working people that all that they have achieved has been won by struggle and sacrifice.

Two long years of struggles led to many more years of change. Conditions at Grunwick improved – the company provided travel to and from work as a benefit to employees, and provided pensions for its staff.

Jayaben Desai died in 2010 but her legacy lives on. In her obituary, she is remembered for being one courageous woman who inspired all who heard her and was defiant to the end.