Jayaben Desai 1933-2010

‘What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo, in a zoo there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips; others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager’.

Jayaben Desai was born in India and settled in England in 1969. She started working at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in northwest London in 1974. This mail order photographic business had a largely female workforce of 440 of whom 80% were of Asian origin and 10% Afro-Caribbean. Average pay was £28 per week while the average national wage was £72 per week and the average full time wage for a female manual worker in London was £44 per week. Conditions were said to be ‘not bad’ but workers were expected to do overtime and long hours at short notice and the management were well known for their bullying, rudeness and racism. The boss, George Ward, refused union recognition and a number of workers who had joined the Transport and General Workers Union in 1973 had been sacked.

The strike began with the walk-out of six workers, including Jayaben and her son Sunil, on 20 August 1976, following the dismissal of a co-worker for working too slowly. They began picketing and were advised by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to join APEX – a notoriously right-wing union which had only ended its prohibition on communist members in 1973.

APEX did not know what had hit it. The six strikers, now trade unionists, were joined by 50 more workers, who walked out demanding the right to join a union. This grew to 137 continuously picketing Grunwick strikers by 24 August, when APEX declared the strike ‘official’. The strikers were offered reinstatement provided they dropped their demand for union representation. This they rejected and they were immediately dismissed.

Roy Grantham of APEX appealed to the TUC Congress on 7 September on behalf of the strikers and a month later Len Murray, TUC General Secretary, requested unions give ‘all possible assistance’ to the strikers, including ‘boycotting Grunwick’s services’. The Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) had been refusing to cross the picket line since the start of the strike, allowing representatives of the firm to collect mail – the lifeline of this postal service firm – from Cricklewood sorting office. On 1 November UPW voted to stop handling mail and refused to allow Grunwick staff to collect it.

George Ward invoked the Post Office Act of 1953 to threaten those who ‘wilfully fail to handle mail’. Supported by Conservative MP John Gorst and the right-wing National Association for Freedom, he pressed for an injunction against the UPW and the Post Office. He also refused to co-operate with the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), which was empowered under the Employment Protection Act ‘to ascertain the opinion of workers to whom the issue relates’, claiming that the sacked strikers were no longer ‘workers’. In July 1977 the Lord Chief Justice ordered Grunwick pay costs of £7,000 to APEX and ACAS for non co-operation in the dispute. ACAS paid the price for this legal victory in 1980 when it lost its statutory role in cases of workplace union recognition.

Pickets were extended to local chemist shops in an effort to dissuade them from doing business with the factory and Grunwick lost another legal battle to stop picketers giving out ‘defamatory leaflets’. In March 1977 a High Court judgment refused ‘to interfere with peaceful picketing in a trade dispute’.

Jayaben Desai was a fearless and principled leader of the ‘strikers in saris’, as they were dubbed by the media. Pickets grew throughout the winter of 1976-77 supported by, among others, Jack Dromey, secretary of Brent Trades Council. Black, Asian and anti-racist organisations, along with every left group, held collections and meetings in support of the strikers. In May 1977 Labour government ministers, Shirley Williams, Denis Howell and Fred Mulley appeared on the picket line.

For Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, and ultimately for the TUC, however, the growing class unity with oppressed workers threatened the consensus between the trade union movement and the ruling class that had existed since the end of the war and had to be stopped.

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) brought miners from Yorkshire, South Wales and Kent to join the mass pickets in an attempt to prevent scabs from entering Grunwick. Police confronted strike supporters with violence; there were over 500 arrests and violent clashes shown on TV every night. Labour was the first government to use the paramilitary Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group in an industrial dispute.

In mid-July the government moved to defuse, control and end the strike, setting up a commission of enquiry under Lord Scarman. APEX said it would abide by the enquiry decision, although George Ward refused to. Despite this, APEX called for an end to picketing. Scarman recommended reinstatement of the workers and recognition of the union. George Ward rejected the report: the strikers were not reinstated and the union was not recognised. Once APEX had called for an end to the pickets, support from other trade unions ‘slipped away’, leaving the strikers to call off their action on 14 July 1978, nearly two years after it began. They had not only been beaten by Grunwick but also betrayed by the Labour and trade union movement.

In November 1978 Jayaben Desai and three others went on hunger strike outside TUC headquarters, demanding support and action for the right to union recognition. In response they were suspended from APEX. Jayaben said: ‘The union views itself as management. There’s no democracy there’.

Six months later, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives took over government. A mass of anti-trade union laws, in particular the banning of secondary picketing, were introduced, with little opposition from the Labour Party and trade union movement that had sold out the Grunwick strikers. The primary target of this legislation would be the NUM in the miners’ dispute of 1984-85.

The shameful history of Grunwick is reprieved by the record of resistance, organisational skills and dignity of Jayaben Desai and her comrades. Let her life of fighting for rights be an example to us all.

Susan Davidson

FRFI 219 February / March 2011