Jayaben Desai: ‘Striker in sari’ who spoke up for South Asians in UK

Desai was part of a community of South Asian migrants who moved to Britain between the late 1960s and early 1970s following the Africanisation policies of newly independent East African countries.

Desai with other protesters outside the Grunwick firm. (@LSELibrary)

Born in 1933 at Dharmaj in Gujarat, by age 22, Desai married a factory owner called Suryakant and the couple moved to Tanzania after the birth of their first child.

Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson, who studied the Grunwick strike for their book, Striking Women (2018), and run an educational website by the same name, wrote that Desai, along with most of her fellow protesters, came from “urban, English-language educated and middle-class backgrounds”.

In stark contrast to the lives they had been living thus far, they found that the migrants had to accept low-status and low-paid jobs. Recounting Desai’s struggle in Difficult Women (2020), journalist Helen Lewis noted that “her middle-class background, and her teenage experience of the Indian Independence movement, reminded her everyday of the gulf between the treatment of migrant workers and Britons.”

At Grunwick, where Desai worked, the workforce had over the years changed from a racial mix to being dominated by South Asian immigrants, particularly women, who were hired at low hourly and weekly wages.

In 1976, Grunwick employed about 500 workers, a majority of whom were migrant women, especially in labour-intensive departments such as the mail-order department. Records show that in the days preceding the strike, women workers complained of being treated poorly with compulsory overtime and being  told to seek permission to go to the washroom.

Anitha and Pearson recount the day of the strike in their book. On Friday, August 20, 1976, there happened to be added pressure at the firm to send out processed photographs before the weekend. Tensions began simmering when one of the student workers revolted when told to sort 13 crates of outgoing mail by the end of the day — a demand he saw as unreasonable. When he was dismissed, three other male workers walked out with him in support. Later, when Desai was preparing to leave, she got into an argument with the manager over whether she would be doing overtime. As she fumed in anger, she told the manager, “Well, what you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. In a zoo there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance to your tune; others are lions who can bite your head off. We are the lions, Mr. Manager.”

Soon after the altercation, Desai and her son Sunil, who was part of the staff, were escorted out by one of the managers. But Desai’s powerful exchange with the manager entered the vocabulary of the Grunwick protest. Over the next few days, protesting workers gathered around the factory gates, holding up placards that read, “Grunwick is a zoo.” The protests snowballed as 137 of Grunwick’s 500-strong workforce joined Desai and the others.

The problem though was that the protesters had no trade-union experience. The big trade unions in the UK at this time were dominated by white men who represented traditional manufacturing industries. This meant that the protesters were now without jobs and any kind of monetary protection.

Desai’s son Sunil first got in touch with Labour politician Jack Dromey, who was then secretary of the Brent Trades Council, who put him in touch with the Apex union, one of the British trade unions. With backing from Apex, Grunwick workers got both strike pay and legal advice.

As the strikers earned solidarity from a wider movement, they began sending their delegations to workplaces around the country. “Women in saris arrived at steel mills and engineering factories and car plants and dockyards,” wrote Lewis.

In an interview with The Indian Express, Sundari Anitha said, “Dominant media constructions of [the protesters] contained an element of surprise. The common perception of South Asian women in the UK at that time was that of being passive, docile and confined to the domestic sphere, not as workers struggling for their rights.”

By the time the protest entered its second year, it had the support of more than 20,000 people. They would gather around the gates of the factory to try to stop the non-striking workers from entering the premises. Anitha explained that the “media depicted the strikers and their supporters as rioters and disruptors. “There was heavy-handed policing and arrests of strikers on a scale that had not been seen since the 1930s in the UK.

The protest came to an unsuccessful end by July 1978 with the government clamping down on them. Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan found the unrest “embarrassing” and commissioned a judge, Lord Justice Scarman, to settle the dispute. Scarman, having gone through the testimonies of the strikers and the management, recommended that the union must be recognised. However, the owner of Grunwick, George Ward, an Anglo-Indian from New Delhi, protested, saying he was an immigrant himself, and ignored the report. Eventually, the Apex union, under pressure from the Labour government, withdrew support to the Grunwick protest. Moreover, the House of Lords upheld George Ward’s right to not recognise a union at his factory.

Though the movement ended up unsuccessful, it continues to be heralded as a historic moment when a broad coalition of workers and ordinary people in the UK took up the cause of migrant women of colour.

Desai went on to work at other places and later became a teacher at Harrow College. She passed away in 2010, at age 80.