10 – Jayaben Desai
“What you are running here 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.” Jayaben Desai
If Rosa Parks was a woman who made her name by taking a stand (or a seat) against injustice, and Miriam Makeba fought for civil rights with her music, and Angela Davis did the same with her pen, then what of Jayaben Desai. Desai lacks the profile of any of the women that we have covered previously, but her actions are every bit as inspiring.
Desai was a fighter for both worker’s rights and immigrant rights, but unlike the three previous women, she was not particularly inclined towards political action before she had it thrust upon her by events. Born in the Indian state of Gujarat in the early 1930s, she migrated to the African nation of Tanzania in the mid-1960s, along with thousands of other Indians searching for a better life. The entire South Asian population of Tanzania was expelled, however, and she found herself in the United Kingdom, where she took a job as a seamstress in London before moving on to work for Grunwick Film Processing as a factory worker.
It was here that she would make her mark on the world. The women employed at Grunwick were predominantly immigrants, the majority from Asian backgrounds and a substantial number having travelled the same route as Desai, through East Africa. The conditions under which they laboured were harsh: they were routinely paid less than white workers, roughly a third of the national average wage and half of the average wage for a London factory worker, as well as facing regular discrimination on grounds of both race and gender. It was widely thought that Grunwick deliberately hired immigrant workers – new applicants were asked questions about when they had arrived in the UK and asked to provide passport details – in order to underpay and exploit them. During the stifling summer of 1976 – the hottest in British history – there was no air conditioning and many complaining of compulsory overtime.
When Desai and four others were summarily sacked in August 1976, the powder was lit. Desai and the fired workers began a picket outside of the factory and joined their trade union. Soon, they had called a strike and won 50 new members to the union, calling for their jobs back, better conditions and union representation. Other unions that dealt with Grunwick began to boycott the company, with the postal workers refusing to deliver mail to the company. A year into the strike, the national media began to take hold, and suddenly, thousands of supporters descended on the Grunwick factory to man the picket lines. Riot police were called in to bus workers into the factory, leading to clashes between activists and police. Jayaben Desai toured the country raising funds and awareness of the campaign, speaking audiences at which an Indian woman had never been heard before: South Wales miners and Glasgow dockers, as well as political groups the length and breadth of the UK.
After a full two years picketing outside Grunwick, a report was published that recommended that the workers be given their jobs back and union representation be allowed. The boss, however, refused, and Desai and her colleagues eventually were forced to call off the strike. Though the demands of the workers were not met, the effect that the Grunwick dispute had on race relations in the United Kingdom and particularly the role of race in labour relations would never be the same again.
The so-called “strikers in saris”, as the tabloid press dubbed the Indian women, had brought together immigrants and the long-established, traditional white working class. Few thought it possible that the white and male-dominated trade union movement – which was, in the mid-1970s, at the absolute peak of its powers politically – would be open to supporting a cause that was propagated by women of colour, but that they did, changing the face of industrial politics in the United Kingdom forever.
Jayaben Desai, always the beating heart of the “strikers in saris”, later said of the dispute: “We have shown, 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.” After the strike, she began working to assist new immigrants to the UK from India, before teaching traditional Asian dressmaking at a college in London. She died in 2010.