entire workforce at the mail order department signed a petition asking for union recognition. Sixty workers joined APEX immediately, and 137 walked out before the management could identify and sack all of those who had signed the demand. At this point, the local leadership of APEX played a pivotal and quite exceptional role, perceiving the iniquities that lay behind the dispute and urging their National Executive to recognise the strike.With the dispute made official – and the company having refused to countenance a union presence and sacked all of those who had gone on strike – the battle lines were firmly drawn. For the workforce, the act of the walk out seemed to serve, in itself, as a cathartic and a liberating act.After years of abuse and being downtrodden, they found a common cause in struggle.Yet, the picket lines proved a hard school of knocks, with daily confrontation, frequent arrests and both Mrs. Desai and a supporter being knocked down, in separate incidents, in September 1976, by cars driven by the management. Mass protests became common place, with the largest, on 11 July 1977, seeing 20,000 people take to the streets.ACAS found in favour of the strikers and recommended that the union be recognised and a government 270
inquiry was launched, under Lord Scarman, and after wading through thousands of pages of evidence, also found in favour of the strikers’ demand for trade union rights. The judgment was simply ignored by the Company, which was now being supported financially by the shadowy, hard-right National Freedom Association and by favourable media “sound-bites” from Margaret Thatcher, then the leader of the opposition.Thus, while the new monetarist Right-wing was being ruthless in its pursuit of its objectives and power, the Left still sought conciliation.The rules of the game had changed, but no one in the TUC seemed to have noticed. Thus, the political consensus that had guided British politics since 1945 foundered at Grunwick.The employer, George Ward, was utterly intransigent and unprepared to bow to considerations of basic human decency; or to withering public condemnation from ACAS, Lord Scarman, and even Jim Prior, the Conservative shadow employment minister. Ranged against him, Len Murray at the TUC and Roy Grantham, for APEX, were unable to see that they were now engaged in an ideological struggle, rather than just another run-of-the-mill industrial dispute.
Embarrassed by the passions of the strikers they were unwilling to countenance the broadening of the dispute, to bring in the GMWU,T&G, and EETPU, in order to cut off the factory from the outside world and thereby bring the company to its knees. Worse still, the solidarity action of postmen at the local sorting office, who had refused to handle the company’s mail, was successfully challenged in the courts. As a result, the momentum of the strike began to dissipate as Jayaben Desai and her comrades prepared to spend a second bitterly cold winter on the picket line.APEX seemed far less committed than it had once been and, with the TUC appearing to distance itself from their cause, Mrs. Desai and three fellow strikers went on a hunger strike on the ice-bound steps of Congress House, in a last ditch attempt to win its unequivocal support.When asked why she did not hold her demonstration outside George Ward’s factory, she replied it was because he “would let us starve to death”. In one of the darkest days for the GMB family of trade unions,APEX reacted by suspending all four from membership. Thereafter, the writing was on the wall and the strike was finally called off on 14 July 1978.