THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WORKAND EMPLOYMENT

Striking issues: from labour process toindustrial dispute at Grunwick andGate Gourmet

MAY 2010

Ruth Pearson, Sundari Anitha and Linda McDowell

ABSTRACTirj_577 408..427

This article applies a feminist intersectionality approach to analysing the dynamics ofthe labour process and labour in two workplaces where Asian women workers were inthe forefront of resistance. It stresses the importance of understanding the linksbetween different aspects of workers’ identities.

INTRODUCTION

The Grunwick strike at a previously unknown photo-printing facility in NorthLondon in 1976–78 is well remembered, well celebrated and well documented. Thedispute at the Gate Gourmet in-flight catering plant at Heathrow Airport in 2005achieved brief notoriety in the press because of the short lived impact of solidarityaction by airport baggage handlers which closed down Heathrow for two days is lesswell documented and relatively uncelebrated. But there were similarities in bothdisputes: they both involved South Asian women workers, they were both initiallysupported by the trade union movement and, in both disputes, union support waswithdrawn and the workers were left without achieving their aims and without gettingtheir jobs back. Moreover, both cases involved the construction of an exploitableminority labour force in which the intersection of class, gender and ethnicity producednot only a group of workers assumed to be docile, but a cohort of South Asian womenwho had a particular sense of justice and dignity.

❒ Ruth Pearson is Professor of International Development at the University of Leeds, Sundari Anitha isLecturer in Criminology at the University of Lincoln and Linda McDowell is Professor of HumanGeography at the University of Oxford. Correspondence should be addressed to Ruth Pearson, POLIS,University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT; email: r.pearson@leeds.ac.ukThis article is based on a research project financed by the AHRC on ‘Subverting Stereotypes: Asianwomen’s political activism—a comparison of the Grunwick and Gate Gourmet strikes’ which was part ofa programme on ‘Diasporas, Migration and Identities’.

Industrial Relations Journal 41:5, 408–428ISSN 0019-8692

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Various parallels between the two disputes, specifically the ways that the Asianwomen workers have been represented in the media, and the complexities of thewomen’s pre- and post-migration history are explored in detail elsewhere (see Anithaet al., forthcoming; McDowell et al., forthcoming). The purpose of this article is todiscuss a relatively unexplored but critically important aspect of these disputes. Giventhat in both workplaces the majority workforce comprised marginalised and relativelypowerless women from minority and migrant backgrounds, who had endured anincreasingly arbitrary management and control regime for some time, why did thedisputes erupt and take form they did? How relevant are the workers’ migrantidentities and experiences to the ways in which they responded to the conditions intheir workplace, and the ways in which changes were being imposed on the labourprocess? To what extent did their gender, class and ethnic backgrounds intersect tocatalyse industrial action in each of these two workplaces A comparison of the twodisputes offers a perspective in which the life and work experiences of the womenworkers involved is key to understanding the dynamics of the two disputes and theconstruction and experience of the workers involved.

THE CONTEXT

This article reports on the findings of a two-year research project interrogating theindustrial activism of the South Asian women involved in these two disputes.1 TheGrunwick dispute started in August 1976 as a walk out by a handful of Asian workersin response to arbitrary and oppressive management in a photographic print facilityin North London became a cause celebre of the whole UK trade union movement. Asdetailed in a number of contemporary accounts, the strikers decision to seek unionmembership led to the strike, later supported by up to 140 other workers, becomingan official Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff(APEX) dispute, and receiving TUC support. The tactic of mass picketing, developedduring the miners strike in 1972 was vigorously deployed at Grunwick with supportcoming from a range of traditional unions and other groups, swelling the ranks of thepickets to an estimated 20,000 on a Day of Action in July 1977. However, this supportebbed away by the end of 1977, leaving the strikers to struggle without the TUC andother union support. They held a hunger strike outside the TUC headquarters inNovember 1977, protesting at the fact that, as Jayaben Desai, the most prominent ofthe members of the strike committee, put it ‘Support from the TUC is like honey onyour elbow: you can see it, you can smell it but you can’t taste it!’. In the end, thestrike was abandoned on 14 July 1978, without any of the strikers demands being met.But it is still widely celebrated as an example of labour solidarity in Britain in supportof women and minority workers.

The dispute which began on 10 August 2005 at the Heathrow premises of the airlinecatering company, Gate Gourmet is less well known and little celebrated. The initialdispute concerned the introduction of Polish agency workers without proper consul-tation with the permanent shift workers, in the main Asian women and members ofthe Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) (Box, 2005). This workforceassembled in the canteen to discuss their response, an action that was construed as

1 The chronology and details of the dispute were included in an exhibition produced by the project team,exhibition entitled ‘Striking Women: Voices from the Grunwick and Gate Gourmet Disputes’ that isavailable on http://www.leeds.ac.uk/strikingwomen.

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unofficial strike action, and led to the dismissal—by megaphone—of all present.Eventually, the union negotiated a Compromise Agreement that selectively reinstatedthe majority of the workforce, though there are some 56 workers who have refused toaccept compulsory redundancy and are still in dispute with the company.

The research for this article was carried out between 2007 and 2009. As well as arange of published and unpublished sources, including documentary films, we talkeddirectly with some of the participants in the two disputes. We interviewed five of theoriginal Grunwick strikers, now quite elderly, as well as key players in the Grunwickstrike committee. As yet there are no academic studies of the Gate Gourmet dispute,though journalistic reports and opinion are accessible via the World Wide Web.However, we conducted interviews with 27 women workers still contesting what theysee as an unwarranted lockout and unfair dismissal.2

ASIAN WOMEN INVOLVED IN INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES:REPRESENTATION AND SUBJECTIVE IDENTITIES

More than 30 years since the Grunwick strike—and five years on from the beginningof the Gate Gourmet dispute—is a good vantage point from which to re-visit theevents that formed the background of these critical episodes in the history of Britain’sindustrial relations. A range of texts have been produced dealing with differentaspects of the Grunwick dispute (Rogaly, 1977; Dromey and Taylor, 1978; Levidov,1981; McGowan, 2008), which focus on the ways in which the strike was organised,the tactics used, the role of the trade union movement, changes in strategy and theultimate defeat and ending of the strike.

The fact that the strikers were Asian women is widely acknowledged in the analysisof both disputes and the appearance, background and provenance of the strikers isdiscussed in some detail, particularly in the books written at the time (McDowell etal., forthcoming). The limited press coverage of the Gate Gourmet dispute alsounfailingly remarks on the immigrant origins of the workers (Gupta, 2005; Johnson,2005). But, although both disputes involved South Asian women workers, they werefrom very different geographical and class backgrounds, and had different educa-tional and migration experiences (Brah, 1987). The South Asian women in bothdisputes came to England within a few years of each other; the Grunwick strikersarrived mainly in the late 1960s or early 1970s with their families, while thoseemployed in Gate Gourmet mainly migrated as daughters or fiancées or young wivesfrom the mid 1970s onwards.3 The Asian women involved in the Grunwick strike hadvirtually no experience of waged work in the African countries where they had livedpreviously, and had accumulated few years of employment since arriving in the UK.However, by 2005 when the Gate Gourmet dispute erupted, the Asian womenworkers involved were comparatively considerably older, and had clocked up decadesof employment in light industry and the service sector in West London since enteringUK employment after their migration. Most of this employment was in unionised

2 The ‘Gallery’ section of the project website displays a range of secondary sources and photographs fromthe dispute. There is also a section listing published works and documentary films arising from theGrunwick dispute.3 Of the 27 (former) Gate Gourmet employees interviewed for our research, 25 reported that they arrivedin the UK around the late 1970s either as daughters or other family members, fiancées or brides.

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workplaces, and several women we interviewed had previously been involved instrikes and walkouts involving South Asian women in London.4

Labour process analysis has tended to be narrowly focused on the experience ofwhite blue-collar male workers, focusing on technical questions about managerialcontrol and resistance in the process of production. Seeking to go beyond what hasbeen (unkindly) termed ‘Bravamania’ (Salaman, 1986: 25 cited in Halford andStrangleman, 2009: 817), Epstein (1990: 89) argues that Labour Process Theory has‘yielded wooden models of the wage-labour process, divorced from the actual expe-rience of work in people’s every day lives’ (cited in Halford and Strangleman, ibid). Hecalled for a recognition of ‘the major concerns that workers bring to their jobs—security, conviviality, tradition and opportunity . . .’, which is absent from the modelsof labour process theorists.

Since the 1980s, there have been an increasing number of feminist studies whichhave challenged this male bias (Ramazanoglu, 1989) and explored the experience ofwomen in the manufacturing sector in the UK (Cavendish aka Glucksman, 1982;Pollert, 1981; Westwood, 1984) and internationally (Fernandez-Kelly, 1983), andmore recently of women workers in globally extended supply chains in the newIT-based economy (Basi, 2009; Freeman, 2000). There has also been a burgeoning offeminist analysis of the ways in which women’s life experiences and locations in termsof geography, class, ethnicity, race and family situation combine to shape the identityand subjectivity of different migrant women (Parrenas, 2001). But there has been lessexploration of the ways in which the migrant identity of the strikers affected theirexperience in the workplace, particularly in relation to the process of becomingmilitant and taking action. Although industrial sociology frequently asserts the sig-nificance of identity markers of race class and gender, it would seem that little of thisrhetorical good practice has actually entered the discussion of these—or indeed manyother—disputes in the UK over recent decades.

Brah (1994: 154) details the issues that are central to an understanding of the natureand experience of Asian women in the UK labour force, which include the history ofpost Second World War colonialism and imperialism, the timing of migrations, therestructuring of the national and global economies, the changing structure of labourmarkets, state policies, especially concerning immigration control, racial discrimina-tion in the labour market and the segmentation of labour markets by gender, class,age and ethnic background. But, according to Holgate et al. (2006) industrial relationsscholarship still virtually ignores ethnicity which remains unexplored and/or uncon-nected with other dimensions of workplace experience, including gender (Healy et al.,2006). As Nolan (2009: 3) observes ‘there is much scope for a deeper understanding ofthe complex institutional processes that reproduce women and ethnic groups as aflexible, underpaid and subordinate supply of labour power’.

The migration experience itself is an important element that needs to be historicisedand contextualised within the experience of particular workers, though this is notnecessarily foregrounded in studies of how migrant workers that has documented theexperience of discrimination resulting migrant workers are subjected to (Ahmad et al.,

4 Interviews with Gate Gourmet workers revealed a long and mixed history of waged work amongst thiscohort. Their previous experience included light assembly and packing work, garments and food processingfactories. Some did unskilled work in launderettes and supermarkets as well as hospital orderlies and oldpeople’s homes. Some women also reported doing home based work. Many worked in low status catering(work canteens) and as well as airline cleaning and food preparation around Heathrow. In contrast to theGrunwick strikers only a minority had worked in family businesses—shops and bed and breakfast.

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2003; Bradley and Healy, 2008). This work has also sought to map the ways in whichsuccessive cohorts of migrants in the UK are deployed in a labour market that hasbecome increasingly unregulated and exploitative (Wills et al., 2009). It has alsoreflected the ways in which globalisation has resulted in what Castles and Miller(1998) called the ‘feminisation of migration’ and the resulting class as well as genderedstratification of migrant workers in the labour markets of Northern economies(Kofman, 2004). But these insights have been less frequently deployed to capture thecentrality of the subjective experience of migration for understanding the nature ofindustrial disputes. One useful approach is ‘mobilisation’ theory, which provides aframework for understanding why workers take collective action in response toperceptions of injustice (Kelly, 1998). In both the Grunwick and the Gate Gourmetdisputes, as we argue below, the workers involved resorted to collective action as theresult of cumulative experience of injustice based in large part on the discordancebetween their perceptions of themselves in terms of their identities of themselves aswomen and as workers and formed as much by their experience of migration, andtheir class dislocation, as by any overt racist or discriminatory practices.

Another useful framework is offered by feminist analysis of intersectionality, whichstresses the significance of interlinking different aspects of identities. McDowell(2008) argues that the construction of people’s identities is the result of the ways theyhave experienced specific aspects of their position, reflecting the time, place andcontext in which their identities have been formed. But these axes are increasinglybased on changing locations, as migration of different types projects workers intolocations and contexts very different from those of their earlier lives. This suggeststhat their class position, as well as other aspects of their identities changes as theymove across space as well as through their own life course and the changing politicallandscape which they inhabit. So the ways in which individuals and groups constructa sense of themselves relates both to previous experiences as well as to their currentstructural locations. Complex though these cross-cutting frameworks are, they areessential if we are to understand how particular groups of marginalised workersrespond to changes in their experience of waged labour over time, and how thischanging experience coalesces, or explodes, into a situation where they—in Burawoy’s(1979) terms—withdraw consent and resist. Intersectionality is useful because it offersus a way of understanding the complexities of the identities of particular groups ofworkers, and also how, and why, in each of the two workplaces under discussion, thetechnical and managerial changes in the ways the production process was organisedwas internalised by the women workers and informed by the various aspects of theirexperience which had forged their subjectivities, leading to the outbreak of industrialstrife. Given the widespread assumptions of the docility of women workers (Smythand Grinjns, 1997) particularly migrant workers of colour from the global South, itallows us to address the question of why these workers, having tolerated what by allaccounts were heavy handed and oppressive managerial decisions and commands forsome time, decided at a particular moment to withdraw their labour and/or resist themanagerial will.

MANAGEMENT STRATEGY AT GRUNWICK: THE CONSTRUCTIONOF ‘CHEAPER’ LABOUR

Management at both Grunwick and Gate Gourmet required their workforce torespond in a flexible manner to changes in the technology of production and the

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competitive and market environments. It is clear from the management strategies ofboth companies that the objective of both companies was to continuously reducelabour costs by lowering the unit cost of production, at the same time as increasing theproductivity of labour—what has been e termed the ‘cheap labour’ strategy (Elsonand Pearson, 1981; Massey and Meegan, 1982). There is ample evidence that therecruitment strategy at Grunwick was to hire workers who exhibited all the classiccharacteristics of cheap labour—for example, labour that was available, that costlittle or nothing to recruit5, willing to accept low hourly and weekly wages, thatoffered ultimate flexibility in terms of hours, overtime and seasonal demand, and thatwas assumed to be docile, and therefore unlikely to resist continuous efforts toincrease their productivity. The Grunwick workforce in 1976 was largely comprised ofmigrant workers, including student relatives of permanent workers, who were hired tomeet the summer peak workload.

According to George Ward, the joint owner of the firm, the original workforce atthe St John’s Wood premises in North West London was mainly white. But as thecompany expanded to premises in Willesden and Wembley, it hired a ‘truly multira-cial workforce’ including West Indians, Africans, Indians, Irish, where the staff werenearly all immigrants, mostly East Africans or Indian, including temporary workers,in the main students, hired to cope with the seasonal peaks in work in the summermonths (Ward, 1977: 30). Recruitment was by word of mouth, using the networks ofexisting employees. Indeed, once the dispute had begun Ward continued to hire‘relatives of those still working, then geared up for the summer 1977 peak of theholiday snapshot market by recruiting workers from entirely outside the communityof East African Asian refugees (e.g. Chinese students)’ Levidov (1981: 132).

In the view of Jayaben Desai, who was to become the strike leader, the recruitmentof South Asian workers was part of a deliberate strategy:

They got more work out of us. Asians had just come from Uganda and they all needed work. So theytook whatever was available. Grunwick put out ‘papers’ (leaflets): ‘come and we will give you a job. Wegive jobs to everyone.’ Door to door. When I went, a friend of mine followed. And soon they were fullof Asians.

Jayaben had started to work for Grunwick at its Wembley premises in 1974. Whenthe new Chapter road plant in Dollis Hill was opened she was relocated there,although for her it meant two bus journeys to get to work. The new premises housedthe mail order department and the computer department, run by a Malcolm Alden,one of the harsher managers according to contemporary accounts. Although hisresponsibility was to supervise the automated system for producing invoices, he washoused in a glass walled office from where he could watch over the (female Asian)workforce who were employed to manually process orders and payments for filmsdelivered at an increasing pace all through the summer. Jayaben recalls how thepressure of work escalated as the company expanded:

I just had to put leaflets in an envelope. That’s what I did at the beginning. That was easy. And we nevertook tea breaks, did not take smoking breaks, so they got a good level of ‘production.’ And graduallythey started shifting the workers and replaced the white workers with Asian ones.

5 Interviews with Jayaben Desai and other Grunwick strikers reported that they heard about vacancies atGrunwick and other similar factories in North West London either through family members or neighboursfrom the Asian community or from leaflets distributed around the local area.

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She vividly recalls Malcolm Alden’s management style, which she argues wasdesigned to produce insecurity; and her view was corroborated by the Scarmanenquiry (Dromey and Taylor 156–160).

The manager there was a complete swine—his name was Mr Alden. He was a manager first. Then, whenproduction increased, they made him a production manager. [after they]e purchased the Dollis Hillproperty—he was doing well, you see. There, he had this wonderful room—where you had a hall andon one side was the booking and on the other the payment department, where I was. The paymentdepartment was separate from the others. And the managers were in a glass cabinet. They could see us,and if they called us in to their office, the rest of the workers could see them, but could not hear whatwas going on. Such was their gameplan. We used to work out of fear.

The pressures on the workforce were partly a consequence of Grunwick’s business,which hinged on processing customers photos at low cost and with a short turnover,an important element in the meeting new consumer demand for instant photos fromholidays in the UK and abroad, which was the result of increasing real wages andholiday entitlement which had taken place since the 1960s. However, how this drivefor efficiency and competitive performance was achieved was key. Management hadtwo options: investing in automating different parts of the production process toincrease productivity; or reducing unit costs by employing a cheap, flexible andproductive workforce. According to Levidov (1981: 139), the automation that wasundertaken was ‘lopsided’; “the chemical processing and accounting phases [had]been subjected to an extreme automation that reduces its workers to machine mindingand reducing the clerical handing of film to a menial, highly labour intensive routine.The computerisation of accounts allows for rapidly retrieving information aboutmoney paid and owed by each customer, without clerks poring through file cabinetspotentially under their human control”.

This resulted in the subordination of the clerical work of handling the film, espe-cially the mail order film which needed to be sorted and billed, to the automatedstages, and allowed management to vary the staffing and the pace of clerical work,according to seasonal demand (Levidov, 1981: 139–140), thus making this departmentthe bottleneck—or pressure point—for keeping up with the high turnover which wasnecessary throughout the peak summer months. Levidov noted that Grunwick hadsecured its lead position in the market for domestic mail order photo processing byoffering a cheap and rapid mail order service for colour prints—with a turnaroundtime of 3–4 days compared to 10 days to three weeks for other firms, a quality ofservice that was recognised by the consumer magazine Which? (Ward (1977: 24). Thenature of the semi-automated labour process, together with the nature of the workforce, and the ways in which management control was exercised with a view tomaximising the flexibility of labour to match the increasing and time-controlleddemand explains why the dispute at Grunwick occurred in the mail order departmentrather than elsewhere in the production process.

One of the ways in which the management sought to maximise productivity wasthrough constant threats of dismissal if workers did not respond to efforts toincrease output. Alden explicitly told the Scarman Inquiry that he used to ‘press theworkforce in the mail order department’ (Dromey and Taylor, 1978: 16). As Desairecalls:

They adopted a technique that increased production. They used to make this list of the workers. Thosewho had produced the most, their name would be at the top. And those who produced the least wouldbe at the bottom. This affected everyone ‘mentally’. I understood how this worked, but others did notalways understand how this worked. They were fearful that if their name was at the bottom, they wouldget the sack. In the summer, the demand was high, so they employed more people. When they did not

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need so many people in September-October they used to make up excuses to sack people. Everyone wasscared. So they started to put in more work to stay on top of the list.

This pressure resulted in a labour turnover of some 100 per cent per year. In themail order department, turnover was particularly high: between 1 and 20 August 1976of 102 workers, 32 people left, with 27 of those departing in the six weeks leading upto the strike (Rogaly, 1977: 37). This would seem to be a very high rate of turnover ata time when there was considerable concern over the relatively high rate ofunemployment.6

Flexibility was also demanded through compulsory overtime. According to aformer striker ‘When we filled the form, they had told us that it was compulsoryovertime, and I accepted that . . .’ (Dromey and Taylor, 1978: 17). But overtime wasnot generously rewarded; it was paid at only 1.4 times the basic rate for the first sixhours, and then at time and a half (Levidov, 1981: 138).

Ward made no secret of this policy: ‘our workers had a pretty easy ride through theautumn and winter months . . . everyone understood that the company’s successdepended on extra work through the summer, and the need to work overtime wasfully explained to them in advance, and was written into their contracts ofemployment. Life was very much more casual through the rest of the year and no onewho wanted a straightforward nine to five job should go to work for Grunwick’(Ward, 1977: 33).

Even so, our informants contested the view that overtime was confined to thepeak summer months, complaining it was much harder to manage when they had towork until late evening in the dark winter months. Rajeshwari Patel, a supervisor inthe mail order department, considered that problems with compulsory overtimewere the main reason why some two workers per month were sacked during 1975–77, though interestingly the precise reasons for the dismissals were never sharedwith the supervisors or other workers, leaving the latter fearful that they too wouldsuffer the same fate (Dromey and Taylor, 1978: 17). The workforce also resentedthe way that ‘[m]anagement could demand overtime . . . shortly before the normalend of the working day, without even permitting the workers to telephone home toarrange for their children to be picked up’ (Levidov, 1981: 138). According toJayaben Desai in her evidence to the Scarman Inquiry: Jayaben; although peoplewere willing to stay until about 7 o’clock, after that time ‘everybody feels that weshould go home because it was a lonely place and ladies were scared to go aloneeven in the evening’.7

The ways in which the labour process was managed reveals grievances that gobeyond the low pay and poor working conditions common in many small businessesduring the 1970s and ultimately led to resistance among some of the workers, whoultimately withdrew their consent to the system of management, by withdrawing theirlabour from production. They subsequently demanded the right to form and join atrade union that would be recognised within the firm as the vehicle to resolve labourconflict—what is referred to in the ILO Core Standards as the rights to free associa-tion and collective bargaining. However, as the dispute at Grunwick, like the later one

6 Hence, the successful advertising campaign that ‘Labour isn’t working’ that was used to such success inthe Conservative Party’s election campaign in 1979 (see Beckett, 2009: 458).7 Taken from the Minutes of Proceedings of the Court of Enquiry on 5 July 1977, from the ShorthandNotes of W.B. Gurney & Sons (photocopy from the Warwick University Contemporary Records Centre).

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at Gate Gourmet indicates, resistance comes not just from the experience on theproduction line; it is also the result of the intersection of a range of factors embodiedin the workers themselves—their class, ethnic and gendered identities, and also theirexperience of migration that all contribute to their perception of injustice and the needfor collective action to restore their sense of worth and dignity that has been affrontedby unjust treatment in the workplace.

Gender and ethnic identity in labour relations at Grunwick

The specific identities of the Grunwick workers, including their educational and classpositions need to be interrogated in order to understand why, although they appearedto management to be an ‘ideal’ labour force, speeding up production led to resistanceand ultimately to the withdrawal of labour.

The majority of the South Asian women workers were ‘twice migrants’ (Bhachu,1985), from families who had had migrated to British East African colonies from theIndian subcontinent in previous generations, establishing themselves as a relativelyprivileged subaltern class. While in the earlier part of the 20th century many Asian(male) migrants were involved in the construction of railways and other infrastruc-ture, by the independence period, most were employed in lower managerial andclerical government jobs or worked in family trading and small manufacturing andservice business. The women were very seldom required or encouraged to seek paidwork outside the household. The women we interviewed all recorded that they andtheir female relatives worked within the home compound while they lived in Africa,though it was increasingly common for such women to do paid work at home—including teaching and tutoring, dressmaking (Herbert, 2009). By the 1960s the SouthAsian diaspora in the newly independent ex-British colonies in East Africa—Uganda,Kenya and Tanzania had achieved a relatively privileged social and economic posi-tion (Twaddle, 1990). Although their very different economic situation in England,caused by their forced expulsion in the early 1970s (Mattausch, 1998) had propelledthem into a manual labour market structured by racialised and gendered divisions.8

They possessed relatively high levels of literacy and education in the English language,as well as the ability to follow instructions and to work accurately at speed. However,in common with women workers elsewhere their skills were not recognised, rewardedor invested in (Elson and Pearson, 1981 Phillips and Taylor, 1980). The strikers whowere in the main from the mail order department demonstrated the ability to performthe complex tasks of processing mail orders, invoices and payments, skills that werenaturalised as typically feminine, and the workers, seen as ‘unskilled’ immigrants,were paid the lowest possible wages.9 Management controls played on the gender,race and migrant status of the workers, escalating the demand for higherproductivity—while seeking to reduce any control or autonomy of the workforce over

8 Dromey and Taylor, 1978: 24 ‘The PEP report of 1974 showed that of all the immigrant groups in Britainthe East African Asians had the highest qualifications and education but the lowest average earnings. Theywere mainly middle class people forced to do unskilled or semi skilled work.’9 According to contemporary sources, workers at Grunwick were paid between £25 and £28 for a 40-hourweek when they started work. This could rise to £40 per week after two years of employment, thoughbecause of the high turnover rates few employees ever achieved these higher rates. This compared to £49.35per week at Kodak, the highest rates in the sector, £40 approximately at Ilford. Holiday entitlements atGrunwick were also inferior to other employees in the sector (Apex report on pay and conditions at‘Grunwick Processing Laboratories’ 1976; Warwick Archives).

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their working day. This happened in a variety of ways which serve to illustrate thepoint about intersectionality outlined above.

There are several ways in which the control—and ultimately the resistance of theGrunwick workforce can be understood as both gendered and racialised. There is anextensive discussion in the literature of the time about how Asian women’s traditionaldocility made it easier for them to be pressurised and exploited at work. Levidov(1981: 144)—with no supporting evidence—claims that ‘Asian women are severelyburdened with an ethos of female purity’, arguing that working together with otherwomen from the same community made it inevitable that norms of conformity wereenforced. He also argued that the fact that George Ward, the Director of Grunwickwas an Anglo-Indian meant he knew how to ‘take full advantage of Asian women’svulnerability in the factory’—what Levidov called ‘a culturally sanctioned docilitywhich could be exploited by capital as the women began to work outside their familiesfor the very first time’ (p. 145).

However, as many have observed (Ramji, 2003) the class position of the EastAfrican Asians complicated the issue of ‘culturally sanctioned docility’ and the Grun-wick women we interviewed, like most of those who had migrated from East Africa,came from households that employed servants, and were used to the status andrespect that accompanied their relatively privileged social status. This fuelled theresentment of what they perceived as degrading treatment from management, overissues like permission to go to ante-natal clinics (Wilson, 1978: 49), restrictions aboutusing the toilets, and the arbitrary imposition of compulsory overtime: althoughWard maintained that issues of toilet access were only relevant in the old Wembleypremises, Jayaben Desai remembers it differently:

When women gathered in the toilet, they used to complain to me (‘fariyaad karti thi’). Later they hadmade ‘rules and regulations’ that you had to get permission to go to the toilets. This woman said to methat she felt ashamed to ask to go to the toilet, so she held back and was in extreme discomfort and feela burning sensation. I told her, ‘Why do you feel ashamed, when he has no shame making you askloudly, why should you feel ashamed. Learn how to say it in English—‘I want to go to the ladies’ andthen just say so without any hesitation’ (JD, October 2007).

The issue of compulsory overtime is also one that is imbued with gendered assump-tions and constraints. It is widely agreed that the proximate reason that sparkedJayaben Desai’s walk out on 20 August was linked to the arbitrary imposition offorced overtime. Although she was already upset by the rebuke to her son, a casualstudent employee in the summer of 1976, earlier in the day, faced with an abruptdemand that she extend her working day beyond 7:00 pm—and mindful of thecomplicated bus journey home, she protested. Her walk out—prompted by the impo-sition of what she saw as unacceptable overtime—was also informed by the constantthreat of dismissal, and her desire to retain her dignity in the face of continualmanagement harassment.

Identity, respect and resistance at Grunwick

This kind of control exercised over the Grunwick workforce was not explicitly relatedto race or ethnicity. As Ward and others have frequently pointed out, the ethnicity ofthe owner of Grunwick meant that he could rightly claim common South Asianheritage with the workers—though it should be remembered that it was the whitemanagers he employed who directly interacted with the workforce. In interviews andother accounts, neither the strikers, nor those who stayed at work, ever accused Ward

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of racism.10 They did, however, reflect bitterly on the ways in which the managementand control system treated them without respect and in their opinion robbed them oftheir dignity and personhood, and according to Desai was central to her decision toresign, and to walk out before she was publicly humiliated and dismissed:

I did not think—I just walked out with my self-respect intact. I did not want to work in such a place.I had that power—that I could have found work elsewhere because I knew some English, I could‘present’ myself and I was used to working. So I left for my self-respect and because I had confidencein myself.

The ethnic origins of the workers, and particularly those that went on strike, werealso important. Although conditions in the mail order plant were the worst in thedepartments in the two premises and most subject to arbitrary and pressurised manyworkers in other departments felt solidarity with those who walked out:

JD: I said things were not that bad in some departments. I did not say they were good. Those peoplewere aware of our situation. They knew things could have been better—could get better. That’s whythey came out. When they saw how we had been treated, they came to support us. They took a risk andcame out to support us. They had experienced some of it—not as bad as we had. But things at Grunwickwere worse than other places elsewhere. They were also Asian—the Asians walked out first. Beforethey knew about strike pay—to support us. There was tremendous sense of solidarity (bhai-chara = brotherhood). These people did not treat us properly and that was why people felt that it wasnot right. And the payment was also not good. They used to give us £25. That was not enough.

Ultimately the point of conflagration was one that cross cut the gender, ethnic andclass position of the workforce. One of the former strikers recalls

it felt bad to see others being treated like that. I had never experienced anything like this before. Manywomen had never worked outside before. It feels bad for people who have never worked outside thehome to have to do so—it’s very hard—then hear things like this.

Nor was there much evidence of solidarity from the non-Asian workers atGrunwick. None of the white workers joined the strike and although there were someBlack (African Caribbean) workers including the male drivers who came out later, theracial segregation within the workplace prevented any cross race solidarity. Thelabour process in fact produced divisions on racial lines. The so called ‘West Indianwomen’ were employed exclusively in the film processing department as machineminders (Levidov, 1981: 145), a process requiring less supervision, which made for lessfraught relations with management. According to Jayaben Desai, West Indian womenwere deliberately excluded from the mail order section as Asian women, perceived asdocile and submissive and bound by community sanctions were regarded as safe to beentrusted to processing the cheques and postal orders (ibid). Whether or not this wasthe rationale it was clear that there was ethnic segregation, at the Grunwick process-ing plant.

These accounts of the ways in which the Grunwick workers experienced the inter-section of class, ethnicity, migrant and gendered identities in the context of an increas-ingly pressured labour process offer some insights into the reasons why the dispute atGrunwick blew up. This is not a complete account; as we were only able to speak toa limited number of those who had participated in the strike and encountered a wallof silence and hostility when we tried to interview some those who had remained inemployment at Grunwick. It is also difficult for Jayaben Desai and other workers to

10 George Ward, who continues to run from premises in Thetford, Norfolk has consistently challenged anyaccusation of racism in relation to his management of the Grunwick firm, and the strike. See http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=10627 accessed 10 May 2010.

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remember the details of the day-to-day experiences before the strike.11 However, themain themes that emerge from our interviews and the contemporary accounts of thelabour process and management strategies deployed within the Gate Gourmet facilityin some ways echo the experience of the South Asian women workforce in the morerecent industrial dispute at Gate Gourmet. The remaining sections of this article arebased on interviews with women workers who are still in dispute with that company,having refused to sign the compromise agreement negotiated by the T&G (nowUnite), which involved them accepting compulsory redundancy and a limited cashsum for compensation.

GATE GOURMET’S ASIAN WOMEN WORKERS

Almost 30 years after the Grunwick strike, a bitterly fought dispute erupted in WestLondon also involving South Asian women workers. They were employees of theairline catering company Gate Gourmet who were involved in a dispute that for atime grounded British Airways planes. These women were part of the long-establisheddiasporic community, partly attracted to West London by the growing demand forlabour in many airport-related services. They had arrived in the late 1970s and early1980s as young brides or daughters of migrant families, typically from ruralbackgrounds. Although educated to secondary level, they had little spoken English onarrival, and had to settle for ‘unskilled’ work, with low pay and prospects. Theymoved jobs frequently in search of better pay and conditions, and in response tochanging labour demand. However, their labour market history, according to ourinterviews remained confined to low-skilled and low-paid jobs within a very localtravel to work area which explains their (often) long employment history at Heath-row, not only food processing but also in airline cleaning and other similaroccupations. They were all longstanding union members.

The occupational position of the South Asian women workers involved in the GateGourmet disputes, like those at Grunwick had remained more or less the same, inspite of the changes in the labour market conditions and in union legislation over theyears. What happened at Gate Gourmet in the summer of 2005 indicates that, in spiteof union membership and in some cases activism, Asian women workers were onceagain subject to arbitrary management, treated as a ‘disposable’ labour force (Wright,2006) and left unprotected by the wider labour movement.

Gate Gourmet, an airline catering company, was originally established as Swissairsubsidiary in 1992. It grew into a global concern, taking over other catering firmsincluding BA Catering in 1997, as British Airways along with other carriers out-sourced their non-core services. By 2001, Gate Gourmet employed over 32,000 peoplein 34 countries (Flying Pickets, 2007). The rise of the ‘budget airlines’ in mid-late 90swas premised on cutting costs and services, including in-flight catering, followed bythe negative effect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States led to a decline inthe company’s fortunes, and in 2002 Gate Gourmet was sold to Texas Pacific FinanceGroup, which restructured its debt and disposed of it in 2007.12 Gate Gourmet had

11 Oral histories do not propose to represent memory as an accurate portrayal of the past, and it is widelyacknowledged that there are both subjective and objective elements to such narratives. As Herbert (2009)has argued, repetition of specific accounts of important events in the past also serve to assert positiveaspects of individual and collective identities.12 Texas Pacific Finance Group sold Gate Gourmet to Investment Bank Merrill Lynch in March 2007(http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL0214903620070302).

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been involved in negotiations about restructuring with the T&G union for at least twoyears before the dispute in the Heathrow South premises13 (Box, 2005).

CHANGES IN THE LABOUR PROCESS AT GATE GOURMET

But behind the bare facts a similar intersection of issues raised in the analysis of theGrunwick walk out are apparent. Changes in the labour process, the concomitantchanges in the management style, and the response of the company to increasingcompetition and changes in the market environment demanded a labour force thatwas required to be increasingly flexible, and ultimately disposable. But whereas in the1970s, recent South Asian Women (SAW) migrants comprised the most flexiblelabour force for Grunwick, Gate Gourmet’s unionised Asian women workers, withsubstantial work experience, became increasingly undesirable. The dispute enabledmanagement to renegotiate the working conditions of the existing workforce as wellas utilise more recent, and more exploitable migrant labour from the Accessioncountries. Indeed, one of the factors that made the East European migrant workers soattractive was their temporary nature; unlike the settled Punjabi diaspora on WestLondon, the assumption was that Polish workers were not ‘Here to Stay’; nor werethey likely to resist to become organised or militant union members. The nature of‘cheap labour’ had shifted since the 1970s, and being brown and female was no longersufficient. Migrant rather than immigrant labour was required, and young and tem-porary rather than old and permanent were preferred.

The Gate Gourmet workers had experienced an intensification of the work processfollowing the outsourcing of the company from British Airways. Initially, the SouthAsian women saw opportunities for themselves as they were brought in to workalong-side established employees; one recalled an enterprising colleague trying topersuade management that it would be advantageous to employ more newcomers atlower wages and worse overtime rates (an ironic position given the subsequent intro-duction of agency workers to undercut the Gate Gourmet employees). She had toldmanagement that

You pay the BA staff £9 an hour and when you double it to overtime, you have to pay them £18 an hourto get the job done. These new staff get £6 an hour and their overtime is 1.5 times—so you will get themto do overtime for you for £9 an hour. What’s better for you—paying £18 an hour or £9 an hour? Andso it was that we began to get overtime as well, on an equal basis. And once we got our footing in thatplace, we had fun there.

However, working conditions and management practices perceptibly worsened astime went on:

The work was relaxed under BA, then gradually, they began to take on more flights and the workincreased. Earlier on, there were no managers—just supervisors. Then they began taking on a fewpeople as managers, as assistant managers . . . Like, you know, reducing the lunch break, saying, why

13 At the time of the dispute, there were 3,000 staff employed by the firm, of which around 2,000 worked atHeathrow: 983 in Heathrow South producing 36,000 on-board meals for 70 flights, 810 in Heathrow Westproducing 29,500 meals for 195 flights, 139 at Hatton Cross producing 22,000 meals for 70 flights. Thenumber of flights handled by South was smaller because South only dealt with BA long-haul flights. Upuntil the end of Concorde flights, in October 2003 they had also fulfilled this contract and their role was toprovide the more exclusive meals with higher quality standards such as those given to first class passengerstoday. This made Heathrow South of strategic importance to the Gate Gourmet firm and thereforeparticularly liable for action by workers. Unlike the shorter flights that were delivered from West andHatton Cross, long-haul passengers would not be satisfied with a few sandwiches and a bottle of mineralwater. So South was also very significant to Gate Gourmet in terms of turnover.

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do you need 30 minutes to eat your lunch? You can do it in 15, increasing the speed at which the beltmoved, and where there were earlier 3 women doing the job, saying let’s try it with 2 women instead.

Those originally employed by British Airways14 had better terms and conditions,including holiday entitlements, sick pay, overtime and job security, but new employ-ment or renewal of contracts was invariably on the basis of the new and worse termsand conditions. The changes in the conditions included zero tolerance concerningclocking in:

Now you had to clock in at exactly the minute you came in and they used to give us three minutes tochange into work clothes.

Workers also told us how Gate Goumet management tried to speed up the pace ofwork:

Take adding a glass to the tray set. If you add anything new, you firstly need to work out where it goes,how you have to adjust the other things to fit that in. . . . Of course at the beginning, or as a one-off youcan adjust it into the old time-scales by working faster, but it can’t work out like this in the long run.

Management techniques, long established in assembly lines employing womenworldwide (Grossman, 1979), were deployed:

They used to warn us not to stand still chatting—keep your hands working while you talk, they used tosay. . . . Work more, work more, that’s how it was. . . . They used to put photographs up saying this isa ‘good worker’. So some women used to try to outdo the others to become a ‘good worker.’

The workers also resented the increasing, and in their view, unnecessary strictnessabout finishing shifts:

Even the change-over times. You know how you mill around when a shift ends. You had 5–7 minutesto wash hands, get yourself sorted. You had a target for the day’s work, and that might mean that youhad a few extra minutes at the end of the day. But now, if you exceeded your target, they always foundmore work for you till the last minute.

Another issue was the reduction in the training given when there were changes inthe kind of work required or when new employees were recruited:

when we did a new work, you got proper training. Like a week’s training for some things. Or let’s saythere was this work, and you got training for it, and it was eight hour’s work, you were given less time,say 6 hours to do it in. Then the next day you had to do it in 4 hours, and in a week, you were expectedto work at par with those who had been in that job for a while. But Gate Gourmet, you got a little timeone day, and the next day you had to work with someone and start doing the full job straight away.

These changes in the labour process were part of long term strategy to reduce costs,but at the same time they reduced the autonomy of the workers who resented themnot just because of the speed up of production, but the degradation of their workingexperience and the lack of respect for their skills at the production line and for thewomen as individual and competent workers.

RACE AND ETHNICITY-GATE GOURMET WORKERS

The ways in which the Gate Gourmet workers relate the salience of their ethnic originas well as their migration experience to their militant protest against what they saw asunfair dismissal in contradiction to their rights as workers was complex. Common to

14 The dispute with cabin staff that erupted at British Airways in the Spring of 2010 echoed some of theseissues, with accusations that BA wanted to reduce staffing and turnaround time for scheduled flights,moving their working conditions nearer those prevailing at the more competitive low cost airlines.

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their narratives was the experience of dislocation—from the class as well as theirgeographical and ethnic positionality as the result of their migrant experience. Thesewere Punjabi women, predominantly Sikh, though some Hindu who worked at GateGourmet were direct migrants who came to the UK to join the male members of theirfamily who had migrated earlier. These Punjabi migrants had come from agrariancommunities which, it has been argued, were overwhelmingly ‘traditional, patriar-chal, conservative and hierarchically structured by caste rules—at least for the nonJat-Sikhs’ (Singh and Tatla, 2006). However, the Sikhs in the UK too are far from ahomogeneous group. While a majority of the women who we interviewed were fromagrarian middle-peasant families, a significant minority were from urban middle classfamilies, or were from relatively affluent land-holding families. Their migrationroutes, expectations from migration and their experiences accordingly were diverse.

According to our interviews and to other studies (Dhindsa, 1998), these womencame from households where there were multi-generations, and for many, servants toshare the domestic work; certainly they had never experienced outside wage labourunder non-family management. In the UK, they were isolated from their peers, wereoften in nuclear or vertically extended (rather than extensive families) and had tomanage housework and childcare on their own, echoing some of the comments ofGrunwick workers. Waged work offered an escape from this isolation—as well as anopportunity to contribute earnings to the household budget as well as to gain somecontrol over their own finances (see Westwood, 1984; Whitehead, 1981). The follow-ing comment, typical of many, reflects the positive aspects of working in a place wherethere were women from similar backgrounds, echoing other research on womenworkers (Holgate et al., 2006):

It was a good place. There were our people there—the place had a buzz about it. It felt like you wereat your college, giggling and talking to your friends. It was fun to work there.

It was in terms of the relationship with supervisors and managers, rather than withco-workers, that negative experiences of racialised hierarchies in the UK wereexpressed

Once. . . . this manager at Gate Gourmet—invited some of the workers for a meal. What kind of mealwas that—just some sandwiches thrown together! But there he began to say some things that werecompletely out of order. Like, you know, that wages in India are much lower, that we must be used tothose kind of wages, that we could have such and such a life if we went back with our pounds, and thingslike that.

The positionality of the Gate Gourmet workers, like that of their Grunwick coun-terparts reflected the downward class mobility that resulted from their migration:

Whatever our background, even if we have grown up with servants, we come here, work hard andbecome one (a servant) ourselves. In India, we wouldn’t have been able to work in these places. But ifanyone tries to show that they are superior to us because they are managers and is rude to us, we candeal with that as well. We are not ‘uneducated’ you know.

But many of the workers also felt that the practice of setting individual workers incompetition with each other stemmed directly from their migrant as well as theirethnic status:

I think it’s with our Asian women, you know, they say, ‘divide and rule’. Well, that’s what they did, bysaying this person is a ‘good worker’ and putting pressure on everyone like that. Some women dideverything they could, went all out to show that they could cope with anything. They then held them upas a ‘good worker’ and held them up as the standard for everyone to work to. And now, it’s even worse.

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Those who are still inside say that things have become unbearable—that they don’t even have the timeto take a deep breath! And there is no one to air their grievances to—no union, no nothing!

However, the experience of SAWs at Gate Gourmet reflects a common reality ofmigrant women workers employed in a highly competitive production process wheremanagers from the dominant ethnic group apply practices that would not be toleratedby local workers (Kusukabe and Pearson, 2010; McDowell et al., 2007; Waldingerand Lichter, 2003; Wright, 2006).

IDENTITY, RESPECT AND RESISTANCE AT GATE GOURMET

The issue of control and harassment of women’s use of the toilets, discussed inrelation to the Grunwick strike, was also a major issue with the women workers atGate Gourmet, especially in recent years.

But then things started changing there. They even began to ‘time’ you when you went to the toilet. If youwere not back in a couple of minutes, it was like, come to the office now. ‘What were you doing there,inside, for so long?’ I had just come back from the toilet one day and was back at my place on the beltwhen the manager sent for me. So I accompanied him [to the office]. There were 4–5 managers sittingthere. He began questioning me again and again, ‘What were you doing there? Why did you go there?’I asked back, why do people go to the bathroom? He would not stop. The same question, again andagain. You feel ‘embarrassed.’ So I lost all caution, I thought, this shameless man, let me give him suchan answer that he feels shame himself. I said, ‘I went to change my pad!’ He was quiet. What else couldhe say? I had said it loud, and he felt shame. I asked him back, ‘Why did you ask me these questions?Is this the way to speak?’ He just sent me back to the belt. After that he would pick on me for everything.

There is considerable evidence from other research on women workers in a range ofproduction situations—manufacturing, assembly, horticulture (Pearson and Seyfang,2002)—that managerial control over women’s access to toilets is a frequent genderedstrategy that is rarely deployed with male workers who have more autonomy overtheir physical mobility as well as different biologically-based needs. It is not possibleto ascertain from the few contemporary ethnographies of women workers in the UKwhether this is a generalised practice across UK industry and/or whether it is astrategy that is more usually found with women of migrant origin, or women ofcolour. Both the Grunwick and the Gate Gourmet workers felt humiliated by it.

Although the workers acknowledged that the company was in difficulties by early2005, they claimed that previously, flexibility had been achieved by using temporarycasual staff rather than replacing the existing workforce:

Our fight was this: that if they are saying that they are losing flights, they are making losses, theworkload is coming down, then why do they need to employ more staff, agency staff? . . . . If theywanted more people, we were there, we had other people who were able to work as temporary staff.

There was clearly simmering resentment before the events of August 2005 at theway in which discussion of the introduction of agency workers was being linked toissues of changing working conditions and increasing the pressure for higher through-put and productivity:

What happened was that the company wanted to bring in the agency workers on lower pay, they wantedto stop giving us any overtime, and give it to the agency workers instead, and they really wanted tochange the conditions for everyone there.

The workers complained that agency workers added to their own workload becauseof their lack of experience and training.

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When agency workers came in we had to give them easy work. If we left the work to them, we could notcomplete the task and we used to have to take over. But ‘we were stupid at that time.’ Why should wetake it upon ourselves? We should have thought, they have appointed these workers, so if the work doesnot get completed on account of their presence, then so be it. We should have left them to deal with theproblem. But we considered it our work, we thought we had to finish the work for the day and get thefood to the flights.

The final straw was the introduction of non-unionised agency workers reportedlyfrom Eastern Europe (Blanchflower et al., 2007). By 2005, there was a new wave of‘cheap’ migrants available to management in West London predominantly fromPoland or other countries from the recently enlarged EU (McDowell et al., 2007). TheAsian women felt that management had failed to acknowledge how they hadincreased their productivity, and accepted (albeit reluctantly) deteriorating conditionsat work; instead they considered that Gate Gourmet had deliberately provoked themby introducing agency staff whose pay and conditions were even worse, threateningtheir own position. They also construed racial undertones to the fact that the newworkers were white:

The place where I used to work, that job is still going, and there is a Polish person doing that job now.What’s the meaning of this? Why did they throw me out, only to replace me with someone else? Thismeans that they removed me because we were Asian. I heard on the radio that he had said that he couldnot work with ‘these people’—who are ‘these people’? We Asians, that’s who! There are no white peoplethere—just a couple of drivers.

THE GATE GOURMET DISPUTE—AUGUST 2005 AND CONTINUING

According to our informants, when the morning shift workers returned from their teabreak on 10 August 2005 they found that some 50 Polish agency workers—both menand women—were already installed in the production line. There had been negotia-tions between the union and Gate Gourmet management about agency workers,which had not reached any conclusion, so the workforce, under the guidance of theirT&G shop stewards assembled in the canteen. Their position was that they would notreturn to the line until the management had agreed to talk to them, normal procedurein a dispute. However, in a move that was widely considered to have been pre-planned, the management declared they were dealing with an unofficial strike and thatanyone who did not go back to work would be dismissed immediately. The workerswere held in the canteen for about seven hours and then a lockout was imposed byGate Gourmet. Dismissal notices (prepared in advance) were handed out. Thoseinvolved would not be allowed to re-enter the workplace until they had signed a newand changed contract. This information was relayed to those in the canteen bymegaphone; staff from other shifts who did not know what was going on, were giventhe information by the security guards who were surrounding the canteen, or foundout through their mobile phone calls. By 11 August over 700 workers, including thoseon other shifts and even some who were on holiday or registered sick had receiveddismissal notices by courier at their houses that afternoon (Flying Pickets, 2007).

The unionised workers present in the canteen had confidence in the guidance andinstructions of their union representatives.

Then [Gate Gourmet] made the announcement, but we stayed on because we wanted to follow ourunion. We trusted the union and thought they must know best. There were union shop stewards therethat day, and they told us to stay there, so we listened to them

Initially the T&G (now Unite) union supported the Gate Gourmet workers; airportbaggage handlers and other workers grounded British Airways flights for 24 hours,

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but this was deemed illegal under 1982 legislation outlawing secondary picketing(Millward and Stevens, 1987). The union proceeded to negotiate a CompromiseAgreement with the company which reinstated 395 of the 710 sacked workers oninferior terms and conditions and gave voluntary redundancies for some and com-pulsory redundancies for 144 others who would be offered compensation of twiceweekly earnings multiplied by years of service.15

In the eyes of many of the Gate Gourmet workers, the way in which the unioncalled out the baggage handlers in solidarity, and then negotiated the CompromiseAgreement was problematic. They resented the ways in which the union had dissemi-nated misleading information, presenting the solidarity action as resulting from theclose networks and the community strengths of ethnic and family relationshipsamongst the (Asian) workers at Gate Gourmet and BA. Those facing compulsoryredundancy were mainly older workers and those with health problems;. Over timemost workers accepted the new contract or opted for redundancy, but 56 workers, ofwhom 50 are Asian women, continue in dispute with the company. After a rash ofinitial media reports, there has been little continuing interest, and virtually no report-ing of the 20 cases taken in 2009 to Employment Tribunals for unfair dismissal.16

CONCLUSION

Changes in the labour process combined with different elements of their experienceand identity propelled them into collective action against their employees. In bothcases, the women were subject to rapid changes in the management of the labourprocess and the disciplining of workers. There are similarities between the two cases,but there are also differences. At Grunwick the form of resistance was an insistence ontheir right to collective organisation and bargaining—that is, the right to join a tradeunion that would be recognised by management. At Gate Gourmet, an already-unionised workplace with recognised collective bargaining, it was the bypassing ofagreed structures and what was deemed to be unfair processes and dismissal thatcatalysed resistance—refusal of compulsory redundancy and holding out in the hopesof reinstatement. In fact, neither group was successful in reinstatement; neither groupwas in the long term, able to rely on union support. Both groups saw resistance aspredicated on their positionality as Asian women who had been inappropriatelytreated by their employees and their unions. But to understand what transformed,apparently docile migrant women into militant workers ready to take action requiresan intersectional analysis that goes beyond the management of the labour process andtakes into account a holistic understanding of their experience as South Asian migrantworkers in the UK labour market.

The outcome of both these strikes did not herald workplace solidarity for womenand minority/migrant workers that many have claimed. First and most obvious, thetrade union movement, despite its initial support in both disputes, ultimately aban-doned these women. Whatever the reasons, whether in the Grunwick case, it was aconviction that the struggle was not winnable, and/or that there were more importantpolitical issues at stake such as the survival of the Labour Governments at the timeand the standing of the trade union movement, or in the case of Gate Gourmet,

15 Full details of these events can be found on the project’s website at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/strikingwomen.16 Only four of these cases, those taken by former T&G shop stewards were upheld.

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because the union had made a grave error in supporting secondary picketing by thebaggage handlers, or because it was already committed to achieving an agreementwith the company that offered a more flexible and competitive labour force, the factremains that they were both abandoned.

More importantly for this analysis, we suggest that the dynamics that propelledboth sets of workers into industrial action were poorly understood. The womenworkers at Grunwick were undertaking waged labour below their skills and educationlevels, because they were recent migrants who were an ideal ‘cheap’ labour force fora management committed to increasing turnover, productivity and profit on a flexiblebasis. Industrial action was a withdrawal of consent to the speeding up of work, theconstant belittling of their sense of themselves—their dignity as they termed it—andthe increasing assault on their autonomy as individuals who had a life outside theproduction process that they valued and wanted to protect. Many of the workers atGate Gourmet had delivered long years of compliance with management directivesand changes which eroded their positive experience of work, and reduced theirrewards in terms of their feelings of self worth, their appreciation of working as partof a team, and their pride in doing a good job and being appreciated for it. In eachcase, a more nuanced understanding of the position of South Asian women workersin the division of labour and in their commitment to a sense of justice and equalitymight have led to different outcomes.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the former workers from Grunwick and Gate Gourmetwho agreed to talk to us about their experiences, as well as Jack Dromey and GrahamTaylor for recalling the events of the Grunwick dispute. Also thanks to Paul Bagguleyand Marcia Beer for helpful discussions and editing, as well as to the anonymousreviewers.

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