"A person like me, I am never scared of anybody,”
As a newly arrived refugee from East Africa, Jayaben Desai hoped for a new and better life, but instead she and her fellow workers found themselves humiliated and exploited. Burning with injustice, she knew things had to change…
"A person like me, I am never scared of anybody,”
As a newly arrived refugee from East Africa, Jayaben Desai hoped for a new and better life, but instead she and her fellow workers found themselves humiliated and exploited. Burning with injustice, she knew things had to change…
Jayaben Desai - Transcript
It was the summer of 1976 and Britain was in the grip of a gruelling heatwave. One suffocating August day, tempers at the Grunwick Photo Processing Plant were frayed.
One woman in particular was furious. She and the other workers had put up with months of disrespect and unreasonable demands from the bosses. She “burned with injustice”. To top it all, as she prepared to leave at the end of day, she was told she’d have to stay behind to work overtime.
The woman snapped and having torn into her manager, she turned round and stormed out. It was a moment that marked the beginning of a defining event in trade union history.
Today we explore the hero of this story, Jayaben Desai.
Jayaben was born in the village of Dharmaj, in the Indian state of Gujarat in 1933. As a young girl she enjoyed relative freedom and loved to play outside with her brothers and fly kites.
Her family moved to Bombay, today known as Mumbai, where she enrolled on a sewing and tailoring course and as a student Jayaben became involved in the Indian Independence Movement joining local demonstrations.
At 24, she married Suryakant Desai, a tyre-factory manager from Tanganyika, which would unite with Zanzibar in 1964 to become Tanzania.
Their first child Sunil was born in India and Jayaben then joined her husband in Dar es Salaam where their second son, Rajiv was born and Jayaben was employed in sewing work at home.
The Desais were part of the well off, educated, professional, East African Asian community and enjoyed a comfortable middle class lifestyle.
Life would soon become increasingly difficult for the family however. It was at this time that the East African countries Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania achieved independence from the British Empire and they began to adopt policies that discriminated against Asian migrants.
Many people of South Asian origin chose to leave, but others were forced to flee, like those in Uganda, when dictator Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of Asian people on 4 August 1972.
The Desai family made plans to emigrate to England, but with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act due to become law in 1968, they needed to move quickly as this act would mean a visa was needed to enter Great Britain.
In 1967 Suryakant made his way to London and was followed several months later by Jayaben and the children.
Britain in 1967 was not a welcoming place for the newly arrived immigrants who had come looking for a better life. These were people who were used to being treated with respect and courtesy, but they found it in short supply in this new country and their social status had collapsed.
Instead they were seen as cheap, disposable labour and as with so many others, it came as a shock to Jayaben and she found it insulting. Here they were in a cold, unwelcoming country, with little status and the object of racial discrimination as they struggled both to find work and somewhere to live.
Suryakant took a job as an unskilled labourer and Jayaben initially worked part-time as a sewing machinist in a Harlesden sweatshop.
Employers were taking advantage, engaging Asian workers on poor terms and conditions, which included long hours, poor pay and without the benefits of joining a union. One company which turned the situation to their own advantage was Grunwick. In 1974 Jayaben took a low-paid jab at the factory.
Grunwick, a mail order film processing company based in Willesden, North West London.
Before the digital age, some of us will remember the days when, on returning from our holiday, we would remove the role of film from the back of our camera and take it off to the local chemist to be processed. A few days later we would return excited to pick up our holiday memories, only to find they were blurred, half covered with thumb prints or our eyes were closed. Grunwick was one of the laboratories where the films would be sent.
The owner was George Ward, an Anglo-Indian who actively seeked migrant Indian women to work for him, believing that they would work hard, be well behaved and easy to manage. Being new to the country, they knew little of trade unions and their rights, so could be exploited.
Grunwick put out leaflets saying 'come and we will give you a job. We give jobs to everyone.'
Conditions at the factory were dismal. Wages were lower than in comparable jobs elsewhere and the culture was oppressive and toxic. The women were marginalised by race and sex.
They had to ask permission even to go to the toilet. If they were in there too long, they would be questioned.
Jayaben said later: “This woman told me that she felt ashamed to ask to go to the toilet...and was in extreme discomfort ...I said to her, “Why do you feel ashamed, when he has no shame making you ask loudly... Learn how to say it in English –‘I want to go to the ladies’ and then just say so without any hesitation.”
The women, many of whom were mothers, were not allowed time off to take their children to the doctor and pregnant women were not allowed to attend their clinic.
Overtime was non-negotiable and could run until 10pm. It would often be announced at the end of the day and remember that these were women who may have needed to get home to feed their children and who would feel vulnerable walking home late at night.
Added to this George Ward kept a list of workers in descending order of productivity and those ranking lowest were frequently laid off, which bred insecurity amongst the existing workers.
The predominantly female workforce were working out of fear and the marginalisation caused by their race and their sex made them feel utterly humiliated. A Grunwick striker later said: ’We had to work there because we were trapped’.
Jayaben felt the injustice acutely, because it was so new to her. It was not something she had experienced before.
On that fateful day, Friday August 20th 1976 it was Grunwick’s busiest time of year processing the nation’s holiday snaps. The mailroom was sweltering, with no outside windows and the air- conditioning unit had broken.
Earlier that day a male student had been dismissed for working too slowly and 3 of his co-workers had walked out with him in protest.
Then Sunil, Jayaben’s son who was working there also, was tickled by a colleague and laughed “stop chattering like monkeys,” said the manager, Michael Alden, “this is not a zoo.”
The whole place was simmering with discontent and work in the heat was slow and laboured. Finally the day was over, but as Jayaben prepared to leave, Alden informed her she would be working overtime.
In response Jayaben squared up to Alden and asked him directly why there were no white girls employed at Grunwick - was it perhaps because the migrant workers they did employ, could be underpaid and laid off so easily?
She then said the words that have gone down in history and which marked the moment the action began:
‘What you are running is not a factory, it is a zoo. But 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 the lions, Mr Manager.’
With that Jayaben and her son were escorted from the premises.
By Monday pickets were outside the gates of Grunwick, with strikers trying to discourage other workers from entering the building. In the 1970s this was a familiar sight.
Jayaben’s fearless stand had persuaded many fellow workers to join her on her strike, yet they were not even in a trade union.
Sunil visited the local Citizens Advice Bureau who gave him two phone numbers – that of the TUC (Trades Union Congress) and Jack Dromey, then secretary of the Brent Trades Council who would become one of their greatest supporters. The workers were advised to join the white-collar union APEX.
Now with the backing of APEX strikers could get strike pay and legal advice and by 31 August, 137 workers were on strike receiving £8 a week from the union.
But the managers at Grunwick refused to acknowledge the strike, insisting that the workers had had no right to walk out and that joining a union afterwards was meaningless. The workers were sacked and George Ward refused to give them their jobs back.
To begin with the strike was small with the group of women workers alone picketing outside Grunwick. They were subject to racial abuse and it was a lonely vigil. Despite this Jayaben had no fear and led the workers assertively, hitting back at their abusers and support was growing.
One day George Ward approached her: “You can’t win with that sari on,” he said ‘why don’t you change into a miniskirt?” to which she retorted, “I’ll tell you something Mr. Manager, Mrs. Gandhi wears a sari and she runs a country of 600 million people. You can’t even run a little factory”.
There was solidarity for the women from the wider trade union movement and it was an important development when the local postal union ‘blacked’ the mail to the laboratory and refused to deliver their post.
This made all the difference and in fact the strikers should have won at this stage, as the factory was completely disabled without its post.
However, at this point George Ward launched a legal challenge against the postal union, backed by the opposition leader Margaret Thatcher, who hailed Ward as a “champion of freedom”. Under pressure from the Government, postal deliveries were resumed and it was a devastating blow for the strikers.
But in a packed meeting of the workers in the Brent Trades and Labour Hall, Jayaben declaimed "We must not give up. Would Gandhi give up? Never!"
She became known for her inspirational speeches. She stood just 4 feet 11 inches high, but she had the ability to hold her audience spellbound. Jack Dromey, who supported the workers throughout the strike, said that he had never come across anyone who had such a way with words.
Her language was “Shakespearean” he said “it was utterly remarkable”. She would frequently invoke Ghandi, with his resistance to British rule through non-violent protest, and Dromey notes how he could visibly see how her inspiration made the other women grow in strength and confidence.
The “strikers in saris” as they became known, now started to travel around the country, arriving at steel mills, car plants and dockyards, making speeches and garnering support. The trade unions were predominantly white male at this time and Jayaben, a small Asian woman, exploited the difference.
Press photographs of her diminutive figure in a sari and thick checked coat, looking up at rows of identical tall policemen, or shouting defiantly into her loud speaker are powerful and emotive.
Small in stature, but with a giant personality, this was not the docile Asian woman the managers at Grunwick had envisaged, but a matriarch, a lioness who roared out in her protest and would submit to nobody. She was prepared to take as long as was necessary, until the dispute was at an end.
More and more supporters were flocking to them and by 11 July 1977, 20,000 people were crowded into the narrow streets of North West London and outside the gates at Grunwick.
Amongst others Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers joined them, along with striking colliery workers.
Protesters attempted to stop buses containing non-striking workers from going inside the factory and more and more pickets flooded in. As they did riot police arrived in full gear as the new elements involved turned violent.
Public support had turned against the strike. It would appear that the media coverage was one sided with the violence of the picketers highlighted, but the heavy handed police tactics almost completely ignored.
On a particularly brutal day in November 1977, when 8,000 people turned out to protest, 243 pickets were treated for injuries, 12 with broken bones and there were 113 arrests.
At the end of the day though perhaps it was easier for the media to report on the hooligans who had hijacked the strike, than on the issues of human rights and dignity at work which were at the core of the dispute.
In years to come Jayaben remembered her people with pride: ”It was amazing, let me tell you, it was amazing.[...] tears were in my eyes to see these people [...] they were hurting themselves and the police were charging them with horses and everything and still they were standing strong.”
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party treated the trade unions as an enemy to be defeated, but in contrast, some Labour Members of Parliament supported the strike, notably Shirley Williams and several others, who travelled up to offer support and join the picket lines.
But by now Prime Minister, James Callaghan was finding the strike an embarrassment, so he commissioned a judge, Lord Justice Scarman to settle the dispute. After a thorough enquiry, he recommended that the strikers union should be recognised and the sacked workers reinstated. George Ward ignored the report.
I would like this story to have a happy ending for Jayaben and the workers, but it wasn’t to be. Despite lasting for two long years, in the end the strike failed.
After various legal battles the House of Lords upheld George Ward’s right not to recognise a trade union at the factory.
Under pressure from the Government, both the TUC and APEX, felt that the dispute could not be won and effectively withdrew their support. But Jayaben and the strikers were not ready to give up quite yet. They mounted a hunger strike outside the TUC headquarters on a cold day in November 1977. But even this action could not change the unions' minds.
Jayaben had been badly let down. “Trade Union support is like honey on the elbow – you can smell it, you can feel it, but you cannot taste it.” she said.
Despite proving that the women had been exploited and mistreated, in the end they lost their fight and on 14 July 1978 Grunwick announced that the strike was over.
Defiant to the end, Jayaben told the final meeting of the strikers that they could be proud. "We have shown," she said, "that workers like us, new to these shores, will never accept being treated without dignity or respect. We have shown that white workers will support us."
With the strike over Jayaben suffered ill health for a time, but then a sewing job led to a teaching post for the Brent Indian Association and later she pioneered an dressmaking course at Harrow College. She was also in demand throughout the rest of her life to give talks to students on the strike.
At the age of 60 she took driving lessons and on passing, discovered that she was "a free bird” and persuaded other Asian women to take their test and gain their freedom. After her husband retired, the couple travelled, enjoying their later years.
Jayaben Desai died on 23 December 2010 and her ashes were scattered near the sources of the Indus and Ganges rivers and in Rotherhithe on the River Thames.
Despite no traditional happy ending, her legacy is nonetheless important.
The factory kept going, but with the eyes of the country now on them, better rights were established for workers, pensions were established and wages were increased. The strike affected industrial relations and perhaps most importantly taught trade unions that rights are not just for white men, but for all and that included immigrant workers.
One of the women, Chandrikan Patel, said later “...because of us, the people who stayed in Grunwick got a much better deal. When the factory moved, the van used to come to their homes and pick them up. Can you imagine that?! And they get a pension today! And we got nothing. That was because of us, because of our struggle.”
Jayaben Desai has taken on almost legendary status in trade union history, but she deserves to be better known. A small, fearless woman with giant charisma, who with her brave “strikers in saris” dared to stand up for what was right.
In 2016 Jayaben was named as one of seven women chosen by BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hour for their Power List, which celebrates the women who have made the biggest impact on women’s lives over the past seven decades.
For as journalist Ayesha Hazarika said: “She highlighted the plight of low-paid women, immigrant workers, racism, trade union recognition - but also dignity, humanity and basic human rights.”