Elizabethans by Andrew Marr

Author:Andrew Marr [Marr, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-09-01T17:00:00+00:00

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JAYABEN DESAI

One of the most persistent and headline-grabbing aspects of public life in Britain from the 1960s until the 1980s was the confrontation between organized labour, represented by the trade unions, and capital, represented by private companies and the state. We had railway strikes and council strikes and strikes in the car industry. We had the titanic confrontations in the coalfields and strikes in the dockyards (of which more later). We had the most political strikes between newspaper proprietors, such as Rupert Murdoch and Eddie Shah, and printers and journalists. School students went on strike and university students went on strike. Eventually even gravediggers went on strike. For a while, if you weren’t on strike, you can’t have been paying attention. But before Margaret Thatcher launched her legislative and physical campaign against the national enthusiasm for striking, we had Grunwick. And this is a story about race as much as about industrial relations.

From the summer of 1976 until the spring of 1978, a battle in a North London suburb over the right of workers in a photographic processing plant to have union recognition defined and explained much of what would follow. At Grunwick, the mutual misunderstandings, and the raw struggle for power, which had affected British working life for decades were played out like morality theatre. At Grunwick, each side saw themselves as the David against an opposing Goliath. But this time, on the one side were an Asian boss called George Ward and his British managers; and on the other, women from India, Pakistan and Africa. It was an intimate battle, about respect, in the new Britain. Female Asian workers, obliged to ask permission to go to the toilet and to accept mandatory overtime and long hours, saw their young white male managers as alien, tinpot tyrants. They had no intention of knowing their place.

Jayaben Desai, the tiny Asian woman who became a symbol of the strike, told her contemptuous manager Malcolm Alden: ‘What you are running here is not a factory, it is 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 those lions, Mr Manager.’ Week in, week out, in her sari and overcoat, Desai led other Asian women on a picket line where they were jeered at and abused by furious managers. She was a hard woman to shake, however. When she felt the trade union movement was letting her down, she promptly went on hunger strike outside the TUC headquarters. To many on the left in Britain, she remains one of the great unsung heroes of the Queen’s reign.

Born in Gujarat, not far from where Freddie Mercury’s family had started, Desai married a factory manager and settled in East Africa. She arrived in Britain in 1969, one victim of the wave of expulsions of Asians from Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda in the 1960s by African nationalist leaders. Better off than many Africans, and keeping

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