by Andy Beckett
As trades council secretary and often the fulcrum of these efforts, the bearded Dromey, sometimes photographed on picket lines with a loudhailer and a leather jacket like a militant polytechnic lecturer or a younger, more fashionable Arthur Scargill, had an intimate knowledge of the borough’s industrial estates and how their employees could be mobilized. ‘There was Rolls-Royce next door to Cobbold Road, fiercely organized by the T&G,’ he remembered when we met in 2006. ‘They were passionate in support of Grunwick. White men, quite chunky, well paid’ – he smiled – ‘supporting these diminutive Asian women. You had that very powerful combination. We arranged for the strikers to visit other workplaces. Women in saris meeting workers who’d never met women in saris before. They would go in and simply tell the Grunwick story. They were without any kind of guile or jargon. They were brilliant. There had not been that sort of mobilization before for a local dispute.’
In 2006, Dromey was slimmer and much less hairy. He wore a suit. He was treasurer of the Labour Party and deputy general secretary of the TGWU, and was married to the equally prominent Labour politician Harriet Harman. He had acquired a national reputation, perhaps the best of any senior trade unionist, for mounting successful campaigns for low-paid immigrant workers. But, in 1976, such campaigns by unions were virtually unknown. ‘In the five years before Grunwick,’ said Dromey, as we had coffee in an anodyne meeting room at the TGWU’s London headquarters, ‘there had been a succession of disasters where unions had let down black and Asian workers. The big battalions were oblivious to the fact that there was a world of super-exploitation in 1970s Britain – exploited migrant labour.’
Officially, British unions had been sympathetic to immigrants and opposed to racism for decades. In 1955, the TUC condemned ‘all manifestations of racial discrimination or colour prejudice whether by governments, employers or workers’. But until Grunwick such laudable declarations had very limited effect in practice. At best, the unions took the same sort of guarded interest in the politics of race as they did in feminism and gay liberation. At worst, racism lingered in unions as it did in other parts of British society.
The post-war labour shortage, which had prompted the British government to encourage mass immigration in the first place, had ended in the sixties. In the seventies, with unemployment rising instead, competition for jobs between the white and non-white working class became more intense. Between the early sixties and the mid-seventies, the Labour Party to which the unions were tied gradually abandoned its earlier liberal stance on immigration and, in opposition and in government, engaged in a competition with the Conservatives to bring in the toughest, or at least the toughest-sounding, restrictions. At the same time, for many white trade unionists, class politics and the interests of existing union members took precedence over supporting immigrants or recruiting them into unions – particularly as the places where immigrants often worked were, like Grunwick, frequently a difficult environment for union activism. When Enoch Powell made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, he was condemned by some union leaders, but many union members, notoriously, took the opposite view. An official of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staff in Birmingham who had attacked Powell was quickly telephoned by members of his union telling him to ‘mind the union business instead of looking after those nig-nogs’.
Less crudely but just as insidiously, records the historian Dilip Hiro in his 1971 account of race relations Black British, White British, right through the sixties ‘Trade unions at the factory level worked in league with management to restrict equal opportunity for black and Asian settlers – in recruitment, types of job available, promotion and redundancy.’ This collusion diminished but did not disappear during the seventies. In 1974, the radical race-relations periodical Race Today commented: ‘The section to benefit most from the trade unions are white men over the age of thirty-five. Nowhere is this as clearly illustrated as in the struggles of black workers.’ When the economy weakened in the mid-seventies, non-white workers suffered disproportionately: between 1974 and 1980, Hiro notes, the number of unemployed Asian and Afro-Caribbean Britons rose by 290 per cent, over twice as fast as the jobless total as a whole. The mid-and late seventies also saw the National Front marching through London and other British cities. The party enjoyed sudden surges of support at local and national elections, and infiltrated union branches. Between 1975 and 1977, the number of assaults, robberies and violent thefts suffered by Asian and Afro-Caribbean Britons increased by almost a third. Not all these developments were directly related – the National Front, for example, took most of its support not from trade unionists but from disgruntled right-wing Tories – but they formed a political climate which, until Grunwick, seemed much less than multicultural.
Dromey, who sometimes calls himself ‘a Brent nationalist’, was quick to tell me that, in the seventies, his borough’s unions were more enlightened than most when it came to race. ‘From the sixties, there was a union-backed, inter-race group in Brent, the Willesden Friendship League,’ he said with a proud bob of his head. ‘Grunwick was a dispute that might’ve struggled to get off the ground in most parts of Britain, but Brent was the borough to have it in.’ Yet even he admitted there were some awkward moments between the strikers and their allies. ‘I remember a meeting in week 12 of the strike when Len Gristey [an APEX official] said to some strikers who were Muslims, “No power in Christendom will defeat you.” I slid under the table.’
Yet at Grunwick, and for decades before, British Asians were not simply the passive recipients of political assistance. The first Indian Workers’ Association in Britain was set up in Coventry in 1938. One of its founders, Udham Singh, was already a member of a union and the local trades council. He was also concerned with larger political issues. In London two years later, he assassinated Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who as governor of the Punjab in 1919 had supported the Amritsar massacre of Indian nationalist demonstrators. Singh was hanged, but other Indian Workers’ Associations were formed in Britain; by the late fifties, there were so many of them that they received official advice from the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and held a national conference, in 1958, which pledged them to campaign for better working and living conditions, oppose racism and form alliances with the Labour Party and trade unions.
By the early seventies, British Asians were going on strike to secure their equal treatment in the workplace, whether the unions supported them or not. In 1972, the semi-skilled staff of Mansfield Hosiery Mills in Loughborough, many of them, as at Grunwick, recently arrived East African Asians, downed tools to protest against their exclusion from the better-paid, more comfortable jobs done in the same premises by white workers. Local union officials opposed the strike, but an industrial tribunal found both the union and the mill’s owners guilty of unlawful discrimination. Two years later, at Imperial Typewriters in Leicester, another group of mainly East African Asian workers, faced with unfair treatment compared to their white colleagues over everything from production targets to tea breaks, mounted round-the-clock pickets, organized strike rallies and won national attention. Again, local union officials opposed their action. After a three-month struggle, the strikers returned to work having won only relatively minor concessions.
Both disputes, however, seemed to mark the arrival in Britain of a new and potent workplace militancy. They showed that East African Asians, often employers or relations of employers before they became immigrants, could, with their understanding of the managerial mentality and their resistance to being intimidated by it, turn themselves into stubborn and inventive shop-floor rebels. And the disputes showed that the East African Asians’ extended family and friendship networks, which had appealed to British employers seeking a quick and reliable supply of recruits, could also be used to sustain strikes. An atmosphere of solidarity and cooperation did not have to be created between the strikers; it already existed. Finally, the disputes stood out for the part played in them by women. Of the first thirty-nine workers t
o walk out at Imperial Typewriters, twenty-seven were female. Often doubly discriminated against, used to balancing domestic and workplace burdens, and more awkward to confront aggressively than their male counterparts, Asian women could seem infuriatingly dogged, disconcerting strikers to unthinking British employers.
In 2006, Jayaben Desai was still living in the same semi in Wembley as in the Grunwick days. On the way there, walking through the area’s neat, quiet streets, with the North Circular moaning in the distance and the sky turning from white to grey, the other pedestrians were mostly Asian women in Asian dress. Soon after Desai answered the door her phone rang and she began a long, unhurried conversation in Gujarati. Her living room was plain: no political posters or memorabilia, not much furniture, a faded colour scheme of seventies brown, a single electrically heated cushion on a hard sofa. Desai’s bird-like frame was swaddled in an oatmeal cardigan despite the mildness of the day, and she wore glasses attached to a neck-cord. She was seventy-three and her health had not been good recently; a few months earlier, when I first wanted to contact her, I had found a speech on the internet, recently given by a well-known trade unionist, which paid tribute to her Grunwick heroics in the obituarist’s past tense.
Now, however, her voice was loud and clear as she spoke on the phone, and when she finally looked around from her conversation, her huge eyes and strong nose were the same as in the Grunwick photographs. She came over and sat down right next to me on the sofa. I asked if what she had done in the seventies had changed her. ‘No. Not much,’ she said, curling her legs up under her. ‘I am the same person. I am a capable person. I can handle home, I can handle work. I can explain things – always the words come to my mouth. I always put my foot first on the threshold. I was born like that.’ She flapped a hand and laughed: ‘Determination is always there.’
She was born in Gujarat in India. ‘My father was a landowner. He was involved with Gandhi before I was born. I was involved in the independence movement when I was ten years old. A flag was always in my hand. In the seventies, a BBC journalist said to me, “Aren’t you oppressed by men?” I said, “I don’t think that way. We have a woman prime minister in India. We have had women warriors in India who fight with children on their backs.”’ She suddenly poked me in the ribs to underline the point. ‘I didn’t know anything about strikes to begin with, but the fighting power was there.’
In her late thirties, she was forced to leave Tanzania with her family. ‘My father said, “Do not go to England. It is not a good country, because the people there are very racist.”’ When she became one of the leaders of the strike at Grunwick, ‘My husband said, “Do you know what you’ve done? They’ll kidnap our children.” I said, “God will help me. And I haven’t had any telephone calls abusing me.”’
From the first weeks of the dispute, the strikers and their allies in the unions dug in for a struggle. APEX was a cautious, politically moderate body – ‘right-wing’ by Dromey’s left-wing standards – but it had been recruiting rapidly in recent years, especially among women, as the white-collar and light-industrial sectors of the British economy were becoming a greater proportion of the whole. In mid-September 1976, less than three weeks after the Grunwick rebels had submitted their union-membership applications, APEX began giving them strike pay: only £8 a week at first, about a quarter of the typical basic wage at Grunwick, but backdated and soon increased to £12, supplemented by another £2.50–6 a week depending on each striker’s needs.
Desai remembered, ‘We made a rota for the picket: nobody stands on the picket line for more than two hours, then they can go home. Two hours meant women could do housework, people could do other jobs. I was doing the cooking at home, everything. My husband didn’t do anything. He was working night shift, so he was getting very good wages, but he was asleep during the day. He would leave for his shift at seven. Sometimes I didn’t get home for good until nine, ten o’clock in the evening. He and my sons had to heat the food up.’ To sustain this dual life as mother and activist – as the strike went on Spare Rib and other British feminists began to show an interest in what the magazine called the ‘Grunwick women’ – Desai rushed back and forth between Wembley and Willesden. ‘I used to go to the picket and back twice a day. I couldn’t drive then. It was a twenty-minute journey, if I was lucky with the buses. But the buses were unreliable then, and there was a fifteen-minute walk to and from the bus stop …’
Her husband and sons quickly accepted her new life as a strike leader – ‘I have a very good family’ – but the families of some of the other strikers were less supportive. ‘A number of the women said to Jayaben that they were having trouble going away from home to [picket] the factories,’ Dromey told me. Despite the growing involvement of Asian women in British industrial disputes, Desai told the Asian feminist writer Amrit Wilson in 1978, ‘Our Gujarati women are often weak. Their husbands don’t want them to do anything which is not passive, and in the end women end up believing … that their life must revolve around dressing up, housework, wearing jewellery and other things like that.’ The fathers and fathers-in-law, too, of some of the Asian women who had walked out at Grunwick pressed them not to continue the strike. Besides the ‘traditional attitudes’ to gender that Wilson found among British Asians – and which, for all the advances of feminism, persisted among many other Britons – there were good economic reasons not to take part in a protracted industrial dispute. Poor immigrant families like those of many of the Grunwick women usually needed two incomes.
So Desai and a core of equally committed strikers visited the waverers and their families at home. Dromey, who from early in the dispute began attending the strike leaders’ daily meetings, helped set up larger gatherings where doubters could be won over. For him, the gender and ethnicity of the Grunwick workforce were not obstacles but opportunities: ‘I wanted a clear statement that there were going to be no no-go areas for unions.’ Yet for all his leather-jacketed bravado in public, in private he was less confident about the strike’s prospects. ‘I knew that we were in for a tough fight from the start: the fact that less than half the workforce had walked out; the fact that we started with no organization at Grunwick. We didn’t know about the early seventies walkout at Grunwick, but we quickly found out. When we did, we were, “Hmmm …” One of our union conveners said to me, “This is going to be a difficult one, Jack.”’
Ward had not seen the dispute coming, but after he returned from his holiday in Ireland, halfway through the strike’s second week, he proved a formidably stubborn opponent. He gave slow but unyielding television interviews in front of his factories, belly out and tie unfussily askew. In 1977, while the strike was still going on, he published a book about himself and the strike called Fort Grunwick, which, as the dispute continued, was what the Chapter Road plant in particular came to resemble. Its tight little compound – a concrete courtyard and a few almost windowless buildings hemmed in by high walls and the backs of houses – had never looked that welcoming; now, with extra wooden panels fitted to the metal mesh of its gates, with razor wire strung around its brick perimeter, with security spotlights and essential supplies stockpiled, the factory began to suggest a new architecture for strike-defying businesses, ugly and crude but functional, that would become familiar in British industrial disputes in the decade to come.
Ward was every bit as ingenious as Desai and Dromey. When the strikers persuaded the main suppliers of Grunwick’s photographic chemicals and paper to boycott the company, Ward sent out his managers to buy small quantities from other sources and drive them back to his plants in the boots of their cars. When trade unionists at British ports and airports, and at the equivalent facilities in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, refused to handle Grunwick’s mail-order business with continental Europe – in the seventies, such were the levers some well-organized strikers in Willesden could pull – Ward bought a six-seater aircraft, took out the back four seats and hired a pilot to fly deliveries back and forth to Rotterdam from a shift
ing selection of small British airfields.
He also fought a shrewd propaganda war. During 1977, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year, he hung Union Jack bunting above the Chapter Road razor wire. He presented himself to the media as a typical British underdog. In February, shortly after announcing a 15 per cent pay increase for the Grunwick staff who were still working, he commissioned the respected polling firm MORI to survey them about being represented by a trade union. Two hundred and sixteen employees said they were against a union, and only twenty-one were in favour. Given the pay increase and the skewed nature of the sample – by definition it excluded the employees who were most in favour of having a union, as they were on strike for that very reason – the poll result was not that surprising. The strikers and their sympathizers inside the plants also alleged to the press that the survey had been conducted in less than neutral conditions. On 18 March, the Kingsbury News, a local Brent paper, reported that the poll had been ‘taken department by department … People [who took part] felt they could easily be identified. They said Mr Ward told the staff that all in one particular department had voted against [having a union] except for one person. They were disturbed that he knew the results so precisely. They also said managers had … shown the voters specimen ballot slips.’
