Jayaben Desai

Jayaben Desai was born in Gujarat and moved to Tanganyika on her marriage, where her husband managed a tyre factory and she lived comfortably. In 1969 the family came to Britain, where the only work she could find was sewing, and later processing holiday snaps at the Grunwick laboratory in Willesden. The workforce was mostly Asian women, many recently arrived from East Africa, paid low wages and subject to compulsory overtime announced at the end of the shift.

On 20 August 1976 a manager ordered her to stay late. She refused, told him he was running a zoo and that she was one of the lions, and walked out with her son. Within a week more than a hundred colleagues had joined her, and they signed up to a white-collar union, Apex. The company sacked them all. The demand was simply the right to belong to a union.

For the next two years she stood at the gates in a sari and cardigan, a small woman with a loud voice, and the dispute became the largest in the country. Postal workers refused to handle Grunwick's mail, miners came down from Yorkshire to join the picket, and in the summer of 1977 there were battles with police outside the factory. A court of inquiry recommended that the strikers be reinstated. The company ignored it, and the government did not enforce it. The union leadership drew back. In November 1977 Desai and three others went on hunger strike outside the TUC's headquarters, and were suspended from the union for it.

The strike was called off in July 1978 with nothing won. She said afterwards that the women had not lost their dignity. She died in 2010.