"We Are The Lions, Mr Manager!" is the story of the Great Grunwick Film Processing Factory Strike of 1976-8, and the inspirational strike-leader Jayaben Desai, one of many newly arrived Gujarati women workers from East Africa.
Grunwick wasnt a strike about wages it was about something much more important than that: it was about dignity. Dignity at work. And, for the small band of Asian women strikers, who braved the sun, rain, and snow month-in and month-out on the picket lines, from August 1976 to July 1978, rights in the workplace and pride at work were far more important than any amount of money.
Night after night the public watched dramatic television footage of clashes on the picket lines, between snatch squads and regimented police lines, on the one side, and wave after wave of trade union members, pickets and protesters, on the other.
Each morning the strikers, a group of predominantly Asian women, colourful saris often hidden beneath heavy woollen coats, would take up their posts on the picket lines, unbowed and unbroken in the face of intimidation, the threat of arrest and the sting of the cold.
They had been employed by Grunwick, a photographic processing factory in north-west London, in the belief that they would be easy to handle, to browbeat and to exploit. Yet, they found their own distinctive voice in the course of the struggle to secure their rights.
Even during the hardest of times, Jayaben Desai had the uncanny ability to evoke a mood or sum up a situation with a perfectly weighted turn of phrase. In this way, she had the measure of the most brutish and charmless of her managers, when she told them: 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!
Ranged against these lions of the trade union movement was, however, a new type of employer ruthless and implacable in defence of his right to make the maximum amount of profit, regardless of the human cost, and behind him a new, highly ideological breed of hard right-wing politicians, fanatically devoted to neoliberalism and the destruction of the hard-won freedoms of working people.
Jayaben Desai: ...my English not good. Yet she talked the language of Ghandi, with the burning sense of injustice of La Passionara. Indeed, at times she was almost Shakespearean. She had a way with words that captured the very essence of the human spirit.
Grunwick truly did make history. The strike saw the biggest mobilisation in labour movement history around a local dispute, with 20,000 descending on Chapter Road in Willesden on 11 July 1977. Grunwick saw one of the most remarkable acts of solidarity in labour movement history with the brave stand taken by the Cricklewood post office workers.
Grunwick put centre-stage the issue of the exploitation of immigrant workers, nailing the myth that Asian workers were passive and unorganisable.
Grunwick was a defining moment in the trade union and political lives of tens of thousands, who came to the streets of Brent to back the Grunwick workers.
