• 1 Parminder Bhachu, Twice-migrants: East-African Sikh Settlers in Britain (London and New York, Tavis (...)
• 2 Joanna Herbert, “Oral Histories of the Ugandan Asians in Britain: Gendered Identities in the Diaspo (...)
• 3 Mohammad Anwar, The Myth of Return: Pakistanis in Britain (London, Heinemann, 1979).

2The Grunwick strikers were predominantly Gujarati Hindus of East-African origin who had arrived in the UK between late 1960s and the early-1970s, largely from urban, English-language-educated and middle-class backgrounds. At the time of the Grunwick dispute they were mostly in their twenties and thirties. These workers have been described as “twice-migrants”1 who prospered in Africa under the colonial rule by occupying an intermediary class position between the colonial rulers and the native population.2 Though all the Grunwick strikers had previous experience of paid work in either East Africa or India, in keeping with their class status this had been in “respectable” occupations such as teaching, secretarial work or home-based work. Following policies of Africanization, they migrated as entire family units and without a “myth of return”,3 making a long-term commitment to settle indefinitely in the UK. This entailed women’s entry into the labour market in the UK, and accepting the types of low-status and low paid factory work typically available to women migrants at that time.

• 4 See Jack Dromey and Graham Taylor, Grunwick: The Workers’ Story (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1978 (...)

5There is a large secondary literature on the Grunwick dispute as well as a range of political and journalistic accounts4 and video production including documentaries by Chris Thomas. We drew on these existing sources, undertook interviews with a number of key actors including members of the Grunwick strike committee and other strikers as well as drew upon archival sources including documents released under the 30-year Rule and Special Branch Files made publicly available over 2016-17. In contrast there are few published accounts of the Gate Gourmet dispute. In this case, in addition to the interviews with the workers, our research was informed by interviews with three senior officials in the TGWU (now UNITE), by direct observation of the proceedings of several cases that were heard at an Employment Tribunal in Reading, and by analysis of the full judgements of the 17 Employment tribunal cases heard between November 2006 and June 2008. These sources provide a unique perspective of the ways in which this group of South Asian women workers experienced the role of their trade union in the genesis, trajectory and official conclusion of their dispute.

• 5 A community group, Grunwick 40, has been set up by Brent Trades Council, Willesden Town Team, Brent (...)

6Whereas the singular account of Jayaben Desai, the leader of the Grunwick dispute, had hitherto served to represent all the women strikers, we also interviewed four other women who participated in the strike. A principal objective of our research was to document the voices of a range of women involved, in a context where the ownership of the memory of the Grunwick dispute has been claimed by trade unions, particularly in the 30^th and 40^th anniversary years when celebrations marking it were held.5 In contrast the Gate Gourmet dispute continues to be ignored by the mainstream media, and there is little appetite for the participants’ alternative accounts of this dispute.

• 6 Linda McDowell, Sundari Anitha, and Ruth Pearson, “Striking Narratives: Class, Gender and Ethnicity (...)
• 7 Linda McDowell, Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson, “Striking Similarities: Representing South Asian W (...)

7Focusing on these disputes enables us to explore the agency of two groups of South Asian women workers, to understand their engagement in mainstream trade union practices and render visible the experiences of women whose voices continue to be marginalised. We recount their stories of involvement in industrial militancy as a counterpoint to widely expressed surprise at South Asian women’s presence on a picket line: a surprise that has persisted despite a long history of South Asian women’s labour activism in the UK.6 These women’s dissent continues to be represented through familiar orientalist constructions - both in mainstream media and some trade union accounts7 - as exotic, impulsive and somehow unusual compared to the norm of the white male industrial worker.

• 8 Florence Jaumotte, Female Labour Force Participation: Past Trends and Main Determinants in OECD Cou (...)
• 9 TUC, Women’s Pay and Employment Update: A Public/private Sector Comparison (London, Trades Union Co (...)
• 10 Shirley Dex, Susan Macran, Heather Joshi, and Andrew McCulloch, “Women's
  Employment Transitions Aro (...)
• 11 Angela Dale, Joanne Lindley, and Shirley Dex, “A Life-course Perspective on Ethnic Differences in W (...)

8In the period after the Grunwick dispute, women’s participation rate in the labour market (as a percentage of women of working age) in the UK increased from 60% of working population in 1981 to 76% in 2001.8 However, occupational and vertical segregation in the labour market continued to restrict many women to part-time, low-paid jobs primarily in the 5Cs sectors – caring, cleaning, cashiering, catering and clerical work.9 Particular aspects of gendered inequalities in the labour market that have been explored include the impact of marriage, child-bearing, life-stage, level of qualifications10 and ethnicity.11

• 12 Sue doi:10.1093/indlaw/dwl011 Botcherby, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean Women and Emplo (...)
• 13 Christian Dustmann and Francesca Fabbri, “Immigrants in the British Labour Market”, Fiscal Studies (...)
• 14 Anthony Heath and Sin Yi Cheung, Ethnic Penalties in the Labour Market: Employers and Discriminatio (...)
• 15 ONS, Employment Patterns (London, Office for National Statistics, 2004).
• 16 Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London, Routledge, 1996); Irene Brueg (...)
• 17 Angela Dale, Joanne Lindley, and Shirley Dex, “A Life-course Perspective on Ethnic Differences in W (...)

9However the employment patterns of women from diverse ethnic backgrounds in the UK have varied significantly.12 Labour Force Survey data for 1979 for example, just after the end of the Grunwick dispute, indicates that compared to 25% of the employed British-born white women who worked in manufacturing in 1979, the corresponding figures were 58% for Indian, 45% for African-Asian, 54% for Pakistani and 50% for Bangladeshi women.13 This pattern of relegation to low-paid, low-status occupations, described as the “ethnic penalty” in employment,14 has continued across the years between the two disputes. Among Black African, Black Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers and Sikh women, who are most likely to be working in low-skilled jobs, almost one in 10 was working as a process, plant or machine operative in 2004, compared with approximately 3 percent of women in other groups.15 Such differences have been the focus of a small body of literature that addresses the implications of women’s different origins and backgrounds for their labour market positions and experiences at work.16 There is also a small but growing body of literature on the labour market experiences of particular categories of women workers.17

• 18 Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Brit (...)
• 19 John Wrench and Satnam Virdee, “Organising the Unorganised: “Race”, Poor Work and Trade Unions”, in (...)
• 20 Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Servants of Globalisation: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford, S (...)
• 21 Anne McBride, Gail Hebson and Jane Holgate, “Intersectionality: Are we Taking Enough Notice in the (...)
• 22 Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London, Routledge, 1996).
• 23 Sundari Anitha, Ruth Pearson and Linda McDowell, “Striking Lives: Multiple Narratives of South Asia (...)
• 24 John Wrench, “Unequal Comrades: Trade Unions, Equal Opportunity and Racism”, in Richard Jenkins and (...)

10Black and minority ethnic women’s struggles against gender-based and racial discrimination and disadvantage in the labour market have been documented, including references to particular examples of industrial action18 with or without the support of their union.19 Parrenas has analysed the ways in which life experiences and locations in terms of class, ethnicity, race and family situation combine to shape the identity and subjectivity of migrant women. 20 But these themes of intersectionality have been neglected in relation to migrant women’s experiences in the workplace, particularly their industrial militancy.21 According to Brah, the issues that are central to an understanding of the nature and experience of South Asian women in the UK labour force include the history of colonialism and imperialism, the timing of migrations, the restructuring of the national and global economies, the changing structure of labour markets, state policies, racial discrimination in the labour market and the segmentation of labour markets by gender, class, age and ethnic background.22 In spite of the research on labour force participation and documented examples of their activism, myths persist of these women’s assumed domestic orientation23 as well as a stereotypical assumption that minority ethnic women workers are difficult to unionise,24 paralleling the repeated media surprise at their presence on picket lines.

• 25 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, Pluto, 1984); Ron Ramdi (...)
• 26 Annie Phizacklea and Robert Miles, Labour and Racism (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); John Wr (...)
• 27 Linda Dickens, Gender, Race and Employment Equality in Britain: Inadequate Strategies and Role of I (...)
• 28 Annie Phizacklea and Robert Miles, Labour and Racism (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); John Wr (...)
• 29 Cynthia Cockburn, Strategies for Gender Democracy (Brussels, European Commission, 1995); Linda Dick (...)

11Despite the long involvement of black and minority ethnic workers in working class organisations in Britain25 trade unions historically have failed to adequately address the needs of women and minority ethnic workers. This neglect has been attributed variously to the ambivalence or hostility of early trade unions towards tackling racism and discrimination at work,26 exclusion strategies against Black and women workers,27 reluctance to take on issues specifically affecting women members,28 and the unrepresentative nature of the union decision-making structures which were effectively dominated by white men:29a charge that holds to this day.

• 30 John Wrench, “Unequal Comrades: Trade Unions, Equal Opportunity and Racism”, in Richard Jenkins and (...)
• 31 Mala Dhondy, “The Strike at Imperial Typewriters”, Race Today July:201-5, 1974; Race Today, “The Im (...)
• 32 Fiona Colgan and Sue Ledwith, “Feminism, Diversity, Identities and Strategies of Women Trade Union (...)
• 33 John Wrench, “Trade Union Responses to Immigrants and Inequality in Denmark and the UK: The Context (...)

12Some of the practices of trade unions in the 1960s and early 1970s included collusion with management policies of paying differential wages based on gender and race, barring certain groups of workers from promotion or selective redundancy strategies.30 Such discriminatory practices were the basis of disputes at Mansfield Hosiery in Loughborough in 1972 and at Imperial Typewriters in Leicester in 1974,31 where South Asian women workers organised against their employers as well their own unions, often with the support of community groups. During this period, strategies of separate organising were explored in the context of the trade unions’ neglect of issues of gender and the lack of representation of women in the union decision-making structures and practices in the UK.32 An initial trade union position that special policies to address the needs of black workers would discriminate against white union members gave way from the 1980s to the recognition of racial discrimination as an issue that required specific action, although measures such as positive action to tackle discrimination took somewhat longer to materialise.33

• 34 Mary Davis, Roger McKenzie and Wilf Sullivan, Working Against Racism: The Role of Trade Unions in B (...)
• 35 Jane Wills, Jon May, Kavita Datta, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert and Cathy McIlwaine, “London’s Migran (...)
• 36 Jane Wills and Melanie Simms, “Building Reciprocal Community Unionism in the UK”, Capital and Class (...)
• 37 Miguel Martinez-Lucio and Rob Perrett, “Meanings and Dilemmas in Community Unionism: Trade Union Co (...)
• 38 Miguel Martinez-Lucio and Rob Perrett, “The Diversity and Politics of Trade Unions' Responses to Mi (...)

13Since the 1990s, trade unions have taken a more engaged approach to questions of race and gender,34 though they have encountered new problems in reaching out to recent migrants who often work in low paid and precarious jobs where unions have little influence. This “ethnic division of labour”35 poses new challenges to trade unions’ capacity to represent the most vulnerable sections of the workforce. More recent research documents efforts by unions to organise beyond traditional structures and alliances,36 in what has been termed “community unionism”.37 However, Martinez-Lucio and Perret challenge the stereotypical approach to black and minority ethnic union members, noting that deploying some notion of collectivity embedded within ideal constructions of “community” results in assumptions about the common interests of black and minority ethnic workers.38 This essentialist approach tends to assess black and minority ethnic workers in terms of their deviation from the accepted norm of the white worker, though the latter are rarely burdened with assumptions about common and collective interests on account of their own community membership.

• 39 Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, “Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers: An Analysis of Women’s Employment (...)
• 40 George Ward, Fort Grunwick, p. 30 (London, Temple Smith, 1977).

14The management strategy at Grunwick was to continuously reduce labour costs by lowering the unit cost of production, whilst increasing the productivity of labour -what has been termed the “cheap labour” strategy.39 The recruitment strategy was to hire workers who exhibited all the classic characteristics of cheap labour - for example, labour that was readily available, that cost little or nothing to recruit, that was willing to accept low hourly and weekly wages, that offered flexibility in terms of hours, overtime and seasonal demand, and that was assumed to be docile, and therefore unlikely to resist continuous efforts to increase their productivity. According to George Ward, the joint owner of the firm, the Grunwick workforce in 1976 largely comprised migrant workers who fulfilled these desirable characteristics.40

• 41 Kavita Datta, Cathy McIlwaine, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert, Jon May, and Jane Wills, Work, Care and (...)

16In line with the findings of other research on migrant workers,41 the Grunwick strikers articulated their sense of themselves as “good workers” in comparison with those previously employed at Grunwick, perhaps in response to dominant negative constructions of immigrants as undeserving and “spongers”, both then and now. As Jayaben Desai noted: “We never took tea breaks, did not take smoking breaks, so they got a good level of ‘production’. And gradually they started shifting the workers and replaced the white workers with Asian ones.”

• 42 In June 1977, the Labour government set up a court of inquiry under Lord Scarman to inquire into th (...)

17The dispute started in the mail order and computer departments which were supervised by Malcolm Alden, one of the harsher managers according to contemporary accounts, whose responsibility was to oversee the automated system for producing invoices. He was responsible for the female Asian workers as they manually processed orders and payments for films, delivered at an increasing pace throughout the summer. Jayaben Desai recalls how the pressure of work escalated as the company expanded, a view corroborated by the Scarman Inquiry:42

• 43 Les Levidow, “Grunwick: The social contract meets the 20th century sweatshop,” in Les Levidow and B (...)
• 44 See Ruth Pearson, Sundari Anitha and Linda McDowell, “Striking Issues: From Labour Process to Indus (...)

18The pressures on the workforce were partly a consequence of Grunwick’s business model which hinged on processing customers’ photos at low cost and with a rapid turnover, an important element in meeting the new consumer demand from the 1960s for instant photos from holidays in the UK and abroad. According to Levidow, the automation undertaken at Grunwick to meet this demand was “lopsided” with the chemical processing and accounting phases being subjected to an extreme automation while the clerical handing of film was undertaken by a menial, highly labour intensive routine.43 This made the clerical department the bottleneck or pressure point for keeping up with the high turnover necessary throughout the peak summer months.44 The management sought to maximise productivity in this department through constant threats of dismissal if workers did not respond to efforts to increase output, and by employing students on casual contracts during the summer. As Jayaben Desai recalled:

• 45 Joe Rogaly, Grunwick (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1977).

19This pressure resulted in a significant problem of labour turnover. In the mail order department, turnover was particularly high: between 1 and 20 August 1976, 32 out of 102 workers left, 27 of whom departed in the six weeks leading up to the strike.45

• 46 Les Levidow, “Grunwick: The social contract meets the 20th century sweatshop,” in Les Levidow and B (...)
• 47 Minutes of Proceedings of the Court of Enquiry on 5 July 1977, from the Shorthand Notes of W.B. Gur (...)

20Compulsory overtime was also a key aspect of meeting high demand with a flexible workforce. The management typically insisted on overtime shortly before the normal end of the working day.46 This had a particularly impact on women, as it interfered with their second shift of childcare and domestic work in the evening. According to Jayaben Desai in her evidence to the Scarman Inquiry, women were also scared of going home late in the evenings.47

• 48 The Scarman Report is available at: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111943 (Accessed 30 Au (...)

23In spite of the Union of Postal Workers action to boycott mail from Grunwick – on which the firm depended to reach its client base and the recommendations of the Scarman Inquiry,48 George Ward, backed by the National Association For Freedom, (NAFF) refused to recognise the union or reinstate the sacked workers. The political climate became more hostile as an increasing unpopular Labour Government struggled for survival. The TUC and APEX retreated from mass picketing and effectively withdrew their support from the Grunwick strikers. With dwindling backing from the labour movement the frustrated strikers held a hunger strike outside the TUC headquarters in November 1977, protesting at the fact that, as Jayaben Desai, put it “Support from the TUC is like honey on your elbow: you can see it, you can smell it but you can’t taste it!” In the end, the strike was abandoned on 14 July 1978, without any of the strikers’ demands being met.

• 49 Colin Crouch, “Atavism and Innovation: Labour Legislation and Public Policy Since 1979 in Historica (...)

25The Grunwick dispute took place at the beginning of an era characterised by the transformation from Fordist to post-Fordist methods of industrial production and a strengthening of the workers’ legal rights. However, this was paralleled by the weakening of other rights which had facilitated collective bargaining, including compensation for the work of union shop stewards.49 In 1979, a newly elected Conservative Government introduced a set of measures that profoundly changed the regulatory framework in which unions operated.

• 50 Ibid.; Kenneth Miller and Mairi Steele, “Employment Legislation: Thatcher and After”, Industrial Re (...)

26Five major pieces of trade union legislation were introduced, which together served to constrict the legal space for collective action enjoyed by trade unions. Severe restrictions on the ability of unions to organise lawful industrial action were imposed, whilst also making them liable to claims for damages in the event of unlawful action. Strict controls over unions’ internal governance and voting arrangements were introduced, removing all immunity in the case of secondary (solidarity) action.50 This latter restriction was to have significant implications for the Gate Gourmet dispute in 2005.

• 51 Linda Dickens, “Individual Statutory Employment Rights Since 1997: Constrained Expansion”, Employee (...)
• 52 Stephen Deery and Richard Mitchell, “Individualisation and Union Recognition in Britain in the 1990 (...)
• 53 Gill Dix, John Forth and Keith Sisson, Conflict at Work: The Pattern of Disputes in Britain Since 1 (...)
• 54 Ministry of Justice, Employment Tribunal and EAT statistics 2009-10 (GB) (London, Tribunal Service, (...)

27In the decades between the two disputes, union membership declined and collective bargaining increasingly gave way to the regulation of workplace relations through the codification of statutory individual employment rights associated with the national minimum wage, parental and maternity benefits and anti-discrimination legislation51 – in what Deery and Mitchell characterize as an assertion of “the primacy of the individual relationship over the collective”.52 Employment Tribunals (originally named Industrial Tribunals) created by the Industrial Training Act 1964 were originally intended to strengthen workers’ statutory individual rights and received just over 40,000 claims in 1978-9,53 the year in which the Grunwick strike ended. The number of claims made to Employment Tribunals rose across the decades, reaching over 130,000 in 2005-6, the year the Gate Gourmet dispute began, and 236,100 in 2009-10,54 only to decline subsequently as upfront fees were imposed on workers taking on cases against their employer.

• 55 Trevor Colling, “What Space for Unions on the Floor of Rights? Trade Unions and the Enforcement of (...)
• 56 Ibid.; William Brown, Simon Deakin, David Nash and Sarah Oxenbridge, “The Employment Contract: From (...)
• 57 Tonia Novitz, “A Revised Role for Trade Unions as Designed by New Labour: The Representation Pyrami (...)
• 58 Paul Bagguley, “The Individualisation of Class Struggle”, Available at: http://www.sociology.leeds. (...)

28According to Colling, there is a link between the decline in unionisation and the rise in individual claims at Employment Tribunals, reflecting the government’s view that “the definition of union services should focus on those services received by union members as individuals”.55 A range of observers consider that collective bargaining has been marginalised as trade unions have been recast as providers of services and advice for individual workers, including redress through recourse to employment tribunals.56 Novitz (2002:1) argues that the unions’ role has been reduced to one that is “essentially individualistic in character, procedural in form, and unitary in specification”,57 although Bagguley insists that these changes represent merely a change in the “repertoire of contention” and that the pursuit of individual cases to achieve economistic class interests is still largely dependent on collective actors such as unions.58

• 59 Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (London and New York, Routled (...)

Alongside these regulatory changes, subsequent flows of migration have led to the incorporation of new categories of workers into the lowest rungs of the labour market in a context where globalisation and outsourcing have led to the re-composition of “disposable labour”.59 Inevitably these shifts have had a profound impact not only on the nature of industrial activism, but also on the role of trade unions in recruiting and supporting their members.

• 60 Ruth Pearson and Gill Seyfang, “‘I’ll Tell You What I Want…’ : Women Workers and Codes of Conduct”, (...)

30There is considerable evidence from other research on women workers in a range of production situations - manufacturing, assembly, horticulture60 - that managerial control over women’s access to toilets is a frequent gendered strategy that is rarely deployed with male workers who have more autonomy over their physical mobility as well as different biologically-based needs. It is not possible to ascertain from the few contemporary ethnographies of women workers in the UK whether this is a generalised practice across UK industry and/or whether it is a strategy that is more usually found when workers are women of migrant origin. Both the Grunwick and the Gate Gourmet workers felt humiliated by it.

• 61 We have put together this account of the events on 10^th August 2005 based on interviews with the sa (...)

32Such mechanisms of collective resistance and bargaining are part of the general repertoire of action available to trade union members, and are not new. The women workers who were informally accepted as “leaders” frequently initiated such action at Gate Gourmet and received the backing of other women in their unit, often bypassing the shop stewards, the majority of whom were men. It was in the context of a history of shop floor resistance to continual attempts by management to introduce non-negotiated cost reducing measures that the Gate Gourmet dispute unfolded.61

• 62 Michael Terry, “Employee Representation: Shop Stewards and the New Legal Framework”, in: Edwards, P (...)
• 63 Tony Woodley, “Gate Gourmet and Beyond”, Address to the IER conference, London, 31^st January 2007.
• 64 Linda McDowell, Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson, “Striking Similarities: Representing South Asian W (...)
• 65 Miguel Martinez-Lucio and Rob Perrett, “The Diversity and Politics of Trade Unions' Responses to Mi (...)
• 66 David Hencke, “£600,000 for Shop Stewards Fired Over Gate Gourmet Strike” The Guardian, 18 Septembe (...)

34The TGWU’s initial position was that the women were provoked, which is why the union initially supported the walk-out. However, according to the prevailing legislation this constituted unballoted action and so the union did not use the term “strike”. The workers were not given “strike pay” but instead received payments of £50 per week from the union “hardship fund”. Union officials were aware that they had to acknowledge this as unballoted action under S.26 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (as amended) to protect themselves against any claims for damages. However, this effectively meant ignoring the alleged role of their own shop stewards in advising the workers against returning to the shop floor, despite management warnings of dismissal. The issue of whether action by shop stewards constitutes direct representation of union policy or mandate is contested.62 This posed a problem for the TGWU not just in relation to the Gate Gourmet shop stewards, but also in relation to the solidarity actions of other workers at Heathrow, who were also TGWU members. BA baggage handlers, bus drivers and ground staff staged solidarity strike action on August 10 2005, paralysing flights for 48 hours and costing BA about £42 million. The response of the TGWU president was to assert the illegality of secondary action, at the same time representing the walk-out as an expression of community support rather than workers’ solidarity: “The law did not allow for these women's husbands, sons, neighbours and friends to come to their aid.”63 By constructing the secondary strike action as personalised, depoliticised support for sacked family members and friends rather than as an act of class solidarity based on their common interests as workers,64 Woodley was reaching for the all too familiar stereotypes that construct black and minority ethnic workers’ industrial action as exotic, as community-based and somehow different from the norms and practices of mainstream trade union members.65 Twelve months later, The Guardian revealed that the TGWU had made payments totalling £600,000 to the two shop stewards involved in the secondary action to compensate them for losing their jobs. In turn the two men agreed not to talk publicly in the face of allegations that they were following union orders by organising the secondary strike.66

• 67 Details of the Compromise Agreement can be found on www.leeds.ac.uk/strikingwomen (Accessed 3 April (...)

35Having initially supported the women, the union’s position changed rapidly. Three weeks into the dispute, the TGWU announced that a Compromise Agreement had been negotiated with the management.67 The terms of this agreement included: re-engagement for some select workers on worse terms and conditions and compulsory or voluntary redundancy for the remaining workers who would be offered statutory redundancy payment. Subsequently, a meeting of the sacked workers and their union representatives was organised to discuss the Compromise Agreement. 56 workers eventually refused to sign it.

• 68 Abbas and Others v Gate Gourmet London Ltd., paragraph 54.

38More than 700 sacked workers subsequently took their case for unfair dismissal to an Employment Tribunal. Since their union had not officially authorised the walk-out, the Tribunal dismissed their claim on the grounds that it was their “own choice” not to return to work. However, the written judgement corroborates the women’s accounts, stating that Mr Dhillon (the shop steward) “followed the advice given to him by Mr (Brendan) Gold the National secretary (of the TGWU) which was to seek a withdrawal of the threat of dismissal before the staff returned to work”.68 The judgement went further:

• 70 Mark Milner, “Gate Gourmet Chief Refuses to Take Back 'Militants'” The Guardian, 1 September 2005.
• 71 John Hendy and Gregor Gall “British Trade Union Rights Today and the Trade Union Freedom Bill”, in (...)

39As a result of this union-sanctioned agreement Gate Gourmet was allowed to select for redundancy those workers who had been active members of their union and hence deemed to be “radical”,70 as well as other “undesirable” less productive workers, including those who had health issues and/or were older. Drawing upon information from Gate Gourmet’s own website, Hendy and Gall note that of the 813 workers who were sacked, 272 were reinstated on worse terms, 411 given the equivalent of (statutory) redundancy pay, while 130 received neither employment nor compensation. Gate Gourmet was able to shed 541 workers’ jobs “by paying the equivalent of redundancy to 411”.71 Additionally, the changes to workers’ contracts, including reduced annual leave and sick leave, enabled Gate Gourmet to increase productivity and reduce the rights of long-standing employees to labour protection.

• 72 John Wrench and Satnam Virdee, “Organising the Unorganised: “Race”, Poor Work and Trade Unions”, in (...)
• 73 Miguel Martinez-Lucio and Rob Perrett, “The Diversity and Politics of Trade Unions' Responses to Mi (...)

41Since Grunwick, the trade unions in the UK have adopted a variety of strategies and frameworks to address issues of diversity.72 However, it has been argued that union strategies for mobilising and representing black and minority ethnic workers have focused on recruitment and campaigning issues.73 The underlying assumption has been that minority ethnic and women workers lack a propensity to unionise, which has precluded any radical re-examination of trade union structures and practices that might serve to exclude particular interests. On the whole, trade union approaches to gender have been more effective than to issues of race/racism. Additionally, issues raised by multiple forms of inequalities experienced by intersectional location of black and minority ethnic women workers remain largely unrecognised as race and gender have tended to be examined in discrete ways and initiatives have remained piecemeal and fragmented.

• 74 See Ruth Pearson, Sundari Anitha and Linda McDowell, “Striking Issues: From Labour Process to Indus (...)

42At Grunwick and Gate Gourmet, changes in the labour process combined with different elements of the women workers’ experience and identity and propelled them into collective action against their employees. The issues of dignity and fairness were central to both the disputes. The Grunwick dispute was a spontaneous act of resistance to managerial control while the underlying grievances behind the Gate Gourmet dispute were downward pressures on pay and conditions and the growing use of agency and contract labour.74 The workers involved in both the disputes resorted to collective action as the result of cumulative experience of injustice based in large part on the discordance between their perceptions of themselves in terms of their identities as women and as workers and formed as much by their experience of migration and their class dislocation, as by any overt racist or discriminatory practices. A useful framework for understanding their position is offered by feminist analyses of intersectionality, which stress the significance of interlinking different aspects of identities. As both the disputes indicate, resistance comes not just from the experience on the production line; it is also the result of the intersection of a range of factors embodied in the workers themselves—their class, ethnic and gendered identities and their experiences of migration, all of which intersect and contribute to their perception of injustice and the need for collective action to restore their sense of worth and dignity that has been affronted by unjust treatment in the workplace. Both these disputes were about recognition as well as rights.

• 75 Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (London, Routledge, 1997), see p. 12.

43This dimension of industrial relations echoes Nancy Fraser’s argument that “only by integrating recognition and redistribution can we arrive at a framework that is adequate to the demands of our age”.75 It would seem timely to apply this analysis to the structures and processes of trade unions in Britain to forge new strategies which support the legitimate aspirations and expectations of minority women workers such as the South Asian women who protested about their treatment by both the company and their union at Gate Gourmet. But this remains a formidable challenge in a period when trade unions remain constrained by both nature of labour market in an era of globalisation and restructuring and by increasing restrictions on trade unions imposed by a neo-liberal state in the UK.

• 76 Available at: https://grunwick40.wordpress.com (Accessed 3 April 2017).

44In 2016, sections of the British union movement collaborated in celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Grunwick strike,76 seeking to locate the historic struggles of the 1970s within the current context of the “gig economy” characterised by the quasi self-employment status of those working for technology-enabled companies such as Uber (taxis) and Deliveroo (meal deliveries). In spite of some significant legal victories, these burgeoning service sectors which employ large numbers of migrant workers remain largely unorganised. The trade union movement is currently exhibiting greater awareness of the need to represent and defend these new segments of the working class, but, like the food preparation workers of Gate Gourmet, there has been little significant progress in changing the conditions faced by the majority of these workers.