Tribute to Jayaben Desai
Lalkar is saddened to announce the death, on
23 December, at the age of only 77 of Mrs J Desai, following a long illness.
Mrs Desai became famous as the leader of the Grunwick strike that took place in
1976-78. The 137 workers at Grunwick, in the London Borough of Brent, an
establishment engaged in the processing of photographs, went on strike when one
of the workers was unfairly dismissed. Approaching Brent Trades Council for
support, they were advised to join APEX, which they did, making the struggle
one for union recognition as well as reinstatement.
It was a strike by mainly Asian women, at a time when
the trade-union movement was still dominated by white males. Yet it was a
strike which attracted the support of trade unionists as a whole, including in
particular the local postal workers who blocked deliveries of post (on which
the Grunwick business relied) in order to support their fellow workers.
Workers from all around the country came to picket.
If in the end the strike was lost it was despite the
courage and determination of the strikers and their supporters. The ruling
class, determined to smash the power of union organisation, devoted endless
resources to defeat the strike. And, as ever, the Labour Party, with its
stranglehold on the official union movement, intervened on behalf of the ruling
class to undermine working-class support for the strike.
Jayaben Desai remains nevertheless a powerful symbol of
the power of the working class, of what can be achieved with courage,
determination and organisation, and solidarity between all workers regardless
of sex, race, nationality or religious belief. The strike with which she is so
much identified lasted for almost two years, and its significance was so great
that her name and the name of a small workplace in Brent, in north-west London, reached international attention. She will be remembered by all who knew her with
strong affection and respect, and hers will be forever a shining example and a
source of great pride for the British working class.
Lalkar pays tribute to her courage, tenacity
and leadership qualities, and even more to the role she played in such an
important event in the history of the working-class movement in Britain. In tribute to Mrs Desai we print below an article which was published in the
July/August 2006 issue of Lalkar to mark the 30th anniversary of the
start of the Grunwick strike. Some of the references are dated, but the message
it conveys is pertinent for the tasks of the working class today.
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‘Old’ Labour’s betrayal of
Grunwick
On the 23 August, 1976,
heavy-handed management bullying and racial abuse led to two separate walkouts
of six people at a photo-processing plant in Brent called Grunwick, leading to
a strike that has since gone into working class folk history as one of the
longest, bitterest strikes in Britain. The six who walked out that day, Devshi
Bhudia, Chandrakant Patel, Bharat Patel, Suresh Ruparelia, Sunil Desai and his
mother (who came to personify the strike for many) Jayaben Desai, were not
trade union members and had not even tried to organise the workforce prior to
their own walkouts, but their anger at the injustices that they had met inside
that plant decided them on a course of action that would thrust them into the
spotlight of the world’s press. Knowing little of trade unionism, they
approached Brent Trades Council for assistance and were advised to join the
white collar union APEX, which they did. There followed an epic battle for
trade union recognition and reinstatement of the strikers (many more joined the
strike as the six set about persuading other workers to join them in struggle
both from that plant and another nearby Grunwick plant that was run on the same
lines).
The strike disproved some ‘popular’ myths, although
it didn’t eradicate them, in the British labour movement. As the workforce was
mainly Asian (many were first generation immigrants), mainly women and with no
history of trade union organisation, just the type of workforce that both
management and the unions at that time (and, unfortunately, in many cases
still) would write off as having no chance of putting up a ‘serious’ fight.
The Grunwick strikers did capture the hearts and imagination of many advanced
workers, who responded magnificently to calls for mass pickets from the
strikers, often in opposition to the wishes of the APEX leadership. And such
was the respect that the strikers earned, coupled with the level of class consciousness
of some postal workers, that the staff at the Cricklewood sorting office twice
put their own jobs on the line (much to the distress of their union leadership)
in order to black the mail to Grunwick which depended for most of its work on
the post.
The strike lasted from August 1976 until 14 July
1978, when the Strike Committee ended it succumbing finally to the united
onslaught and betrayal of forces that pretended to be opposites but were shown
up here (as in so many instances before and since) as fellow supporters of
imperialism. These ‘forces’ included on the one hand, the employer, the
Conservative Party and National Association For Freedom (NAFF); while on the
other hand we saw the Labour Government, all the forces of state power, the
Labour Party (in spite of noises of support for the strikers from individual
members) and the majority of trade union leaderships involved (the NUM being
the outstanding exception) and, of course, the TUC itself.
It has been said that the role of NAFF was pivotal
in the defeat of the strike; their high profile certainly spared the blushes of
the social-democratic gentry of the Labour Party and TUC, who were doing far
more to aid the employer than NAFF could ever do. NAFF was formed in 1975 by a
motley band of rightwing mavericks as a tribute to and a continuation of the
‘work’ of Norris McWhirter, who, after offering a £50,000 bounty for
information on IRA soldiers responsible for actions in London was visited and
executed by the IRA. Naff certainly knew their way around legal procedures and
could rustle up people to scab, but they would have been insignificant without
the aid of social-democracy. When the postal workers blacked the mail, the
Post Office, at that time still run by the government (‘old’ Labour), suspended
workers, locked them out and allowed the employer to go in and collect their
mail. And it did this when the Special Patrol Group (SPG) were driving around
in their vans, kidnapping strikers and pickets and giving them a beating,
causing all kinds of provocations and leading police brutality against mass
pickets, when ‘ordinary’ police were wading into pickets and coming straight
out of the Grunwick canteen to launch their attacks. All this could have been
stopped by the Labour Government, all of it was in their control; with just a
word the Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, could have stopped the involvement of the
SPG, could have stopped the open collusion between the local police and the
employer. The Post Office management could not have taken the action that it
did without a ‘nod’ from the ‘old’ Labour Government. The trade union leaders
who tried every trick in the book to lead the strikers down the path of ‘token’
pickets and putting faith in the law, who pulled all kinds of tricks to thwart the
strikers even to the extent of cutting/suspending strike pay and threatening to
take away the strike’s ‘official’ status if mass pickets were not ended, who
put pressure on other workers, such as those postal workers at Cricklewood, not
to take any action that would be of genuine benefit to the strikers, showed
that they had the interests of the current political system at heart. They
could have taken the government on; it was after all supposed to be their
government, remember this was before what is commonly called ‘New’ Labour and
what many on the so-called left are striving to get back to.
Social-democracy within the trade unions as with the Labour Party was more
scared of a workers’ victory than the employer’s.
There are of course parallels that can be drawn
between this dispute and others since. The Hillingdon Hospital dispute
springs to mind when another mainly female, mainly Asian, workforce fought
their employer, their union (Unison) and a Labour Government and were certainly
betrayed by the latter two. Also the current Gate Gourmet dispute carries the
same hallmarks. It is interesting to note that Jack Dromey, Assistant General
Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), who as Secretary
of Brent Trades Council during the Grunwick dispute wrote a book Grunwick:
The Workers’ Story to oppose the book written by George Ward the owner of
Grunwick, now finds himself in the position of helping stab those Gate Gourmet
workers in the back – such is the role that following the path of
social-democracy leads one to.
The racism that is stirred up in
the press on behalf of the Labour Government against immigrants helps to
undermine support from other workers, but the whole ideology of
social-democracy that permeates the British Labour movement is the real problem for all workers regardless of colour or nationality. One only has to look at the case of
the Liverpool Dockers, mainly male, mainly white and with years of trade union
experience behind them, to see that Labour (old, new or any other label they
may choose to tag on) as a party in or out of Government, the trade union
leaders both within individual unions and the TUC, are there to keep the lid on
our resistance and must be challenged. Social-democracy has its champions on
the so-called left in the guise of Trotskyism and revisionism, who will always
try to muddy the water, always try to offer a ‘leftwing’ reason for supporting
the Labour Party; these supporters of imperialism in revolutionary clothing
must also be challenged and shown up for what they are. There is a mountain to
climb in Britain, but if we can expose all the racism (and the need for racism)
of social-democracy; if we can break the masses away from the poison of
social-democracy by breaking them away from the Labour Party; if we can
challenge and destroy those anti-union laws that the Labour Party and the trade
union leaderships cling to for dear life; and at the same time fight and show
up the Trots and revisionists as revolutionary sounding charlatans; we will have
taken a step up that mountain. To refuse these necessary tasks is to come to
the assistance of imperialism; which is quite happy for us to keep going around
in circles following the sirens of social-democracy. It is time to choose.