This is a British story. It is a personal tale from my past of one of the formative events that shaped the Industrial Relations scene in the UK, during the late seventies.
I am now a senile old man (according to my 7-year-old). While writing this Diary was a personal journey through faded memories, I have tried to be accurate, and I have also tried to convey the feeling of the times, seen through the eyes of an eighteen year old. Forgive any minor discrepancies.
The following is an abridged account of an industrial dispute in the UK in the late seventies. I have read fairly widely and only relayed here the main points. I am publishing this not just because it is a fascinating story in it's own right, but mainly because ... I was there!
On a quiet street, in Willesden, a fairly nondescript suburb of London, stood a large Photo Processing Plant called "Grunwicks". What happened there during a two year period in the late seventies was a milestone both in Labour Relations, and Race Relations, in the UK.
With the boom in travel during the sixties, local chemists (drugstores) could no longer keep pace with the demand for film processing. To meet this need, several large Photo Labs were established. One such lab was Grunwicks. Founded in 1965 it served consumers via mail-in photo processing. It operated under several trade names and, certainly later, I used them as did most of my family. This was, however, many years after the events told here.
Willesden was right at the heart of a large immigrant community. Most came from the Indian Sub-continent .... Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, but many from the Caribbean too. Grunwicks recruited it's 400 plus staff from this community with the Asian (Indian) community supplying about 80 percent, 10 percent Afro-Caribbean and the rest White.
Conditions in the plant were okay. The factory was new, well equipped, well lit etc. The later report authored by Lord Scarman confirmed this. What was not at issue was the fact that the hours could be long, and the wages low. Particularly in the summer, during the months of peak demand, overtime was compulsory and could be required with no notice. Generally the workforce accepted this as it was never really a bone of contention. Wages, at the time of the dispute were roughly fifty percent of comparable wages in London.
Throughout the period, 1965 to 1976, that the company was operating prior to the strike, it was apparent that the management kept wages low by employing minority workers, and regularly firing any dissidents. Indeed the Transport and General Workers Union had tried to unionise the plant in the early seventies; which had lead to the firing of any workers who had joined that Union.
Things went along like this until the summer of 1976, when a series of small incidents sparked a two year strike that had enormous implications for both Industrial and Race Relations in the UK. It is commonly thought that the miner's strike of 1984, and to an extent the earlier miner's strike in 1974 were the motivation for Margret Thatcher to target the Trades Unions. What is less well understood is that Grunwicks was a prime motivator, the 1984 miner's strike merely being the result.
In the summer of 1976 the air conditioning broke down. Despite this the management insisted that production levels were maintained, and made little allowance for the oppressive heat that summer. One worker was fired for "working too slowly", and three others walked out in support. Shortly before 7pm that evening, Mrs Jayaben Desai put on her coat to go home, and was fired for so doing. Her son walked out in support. Three days later the six began picketing the factory, and the strike was on.
Over the next few months things happened, but slowly. The six joined the union APEX (not the best choice). Others joined the union too and were fired, so the picket grew in size. APEX made the strike official which opened up support from other Trades Unions. The post office workers refused to cross the picket lines, so staff had to go to the local sorting office to collect the truckloads of mail. Remember this was a mail-order business.
The company refused any and all attempts to instigate arbitration, and eventually the Post Office workers refused to release the mail. This put the company about a week from liquidation. After some hasty negotiations, mail collection was resumed, but the call had gone out for support, and that call was met. The response was over-whelming.
At the time I was 17. I was serving on the Trades Union Council in Ashford, Kent representing the Shopworkers Union (USDAW). All the local Trades Councils were asked to help with a mass picket at the factory, some sixty miles away. So we went. Every Monday during June and July of 1977. My memory is a little hazy of all the details, but the impression it created on that High School Senior, over three decades ago, has never dimmed.
We would pack up a lunch and aim to be on the picket line at 5am. Lunch would be left in the car as all the action was over by about 9am. Leaving at 4am we would drive to London and park maybe half a mile away, walking the rest. The first time it was quiet. There were a few police officers around, but nothing to indicate what was to come.
What was to come was the sight of Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, leading hundreds of miners assembled from Wales, from Kent and from the Yorkshire coalfields, down this narrow closed-in street to stand picket.
These men of the earth, white to a man, hard men who lived a dangerous life and were in no mood to be messed about, marched down the road to stand shoulder to shoulder with Asian women workers who they didn't know from Adam. They had traveled hundreds of miles to be here, and this historic moment was the first time in UK Industrial Relations that a basically white, male workforce had put down their tools to support minority workers.
Mrs Jayaben Desai
I can't remember if it was that day or not, but I can remember that we won at least some of the battles. That day the buses carrying the scabs did not pass. That day the mail stayed in the sorting office. That day the Police stayed largely in their Police Stations. That was to change.
Arthur Scargill (Black jacket, no tie) leads Miners to picket
The next time we went things were different. The strike, and scenes from it had reached the BBC and were headline news. This time the Police were prepared. Thousands of them. The ones that weren't already lining the streets were holed up in side streets, waiting in their green buses. They would not have long to wait.
I remember thinking that things could get a bit scary ... A BIT???
I had deliberately worn dark, featureless clothes because I didn't want singling out. I was a kid, I wasn't sure I even wanted to be there, but it felt like I was doing something that mattered, so I pretended that all was well, and we were just going to a football match.
The picture below is pretty much the sight that greeted us:
The Metropolitan Police had recently formed a new "Special Patrol Group". A highly trained almost para-military group that were mobile and being used for the first time in an industrial dispute. Over the course of the two months of the mass picket they, and the regular officers arrested 550 pickets, and they didn't do it gently. Most of those arrested received small fines at the most ridiculous court hearings. Britain's Bobbies ... the finest. For those of you who think that the British Police are a bunch of pussies, what with no guns and quaint truncheons; well from what I saw, those truncheons bloody well hurt, and the bruises took weeks to fade.
There was substantial political support during the strike. Labour under Callaghan were in power, and MPs including Cabinet Ministers were regular visitors to the picket line. The following picture shows three Cabinet Ministers. The woman is Shirley Williams who was later to leave the Labour Party and form the Social Democratic Party. That failed too.
We traveled to help with this dispute a number of times. It was ugly, it was formative and it was inspirational for me. Ultimately, for the workers, it was unsuccessful.
It failed to get the workers their jobs back, and it failed to Unionise the plant. Wages at the plant improved considerably, and by the end of the dispute they were on a par with the average for the industry, if not slightly better.
After the dispute Lord Scarman offered the following: wiki
The Scarman Inquiry recommended the reinstatement of the strikers, said that the management had acted "within the letter but outside the spirit of the law" and that union recognition could "help the company as well as the employees". Ward rejected the report, the strikers were not reinstated and the union was not recognised. A House of Lords ruling upheld Ward's right not to recognise a union. The strike's support from other unions "slipped away" leaving the strikers called off their action on 14 July 1978, nearly two years after it had begun. Their demands for collective bargaining were never met.
It was the beginning of the end of Trade Union power, although few knew it at the time. Despite this setback it did come only four years after the Miners had brought down the Heath Government, but 1979 saw a General Election, and Margret Thatcher wreaked havoc on the social fabric of the UK.
For race relations, and for women in the workplace, it was a seminal moment. The day the workers marched and fought for a small group of Asian women was one of those occasions that touches everyone who was there, everyone who saw it on TV, and everyone who heard about it.
The strike failed for all the usual reasons. The Trades Union Council, under enormous pressure from a Labour Government, withdrew support, and the action fizzled. The strikers won every Court action along the way, and won the Scarman Inquiry, but they lost at least a part of that particular war.
Jayaben Desai died in December 2010. Aged 77