Striking Women: Struggles and Strategies of South Asian Women Workers from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet by Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson (review)

Momentous industrial events have both contemporary and historical meaning as well as historiographical significance. This book tells the story of the Grunwick Strike of 1976–78 and the strike at Gate Gourmet in 2005 in the United Kingdom, but it also tells us an important story about labour historiography.

In terms of the empirical detail, in both disputes women from South Asia were collectively making history in their fight to preserve and improve workers’ rights in their own firms, but also to gain a better life for migrant women and carve out a place for them within the UK union movement. Amid hostile industrial relations policies, the decline of organised labour, the increasing precariousness of employment and negative attitudes towards strikes as instruments for industrial and social change, these women stood their ground to preserve their wages and conditions and livelihood. Tracing the ebbs and flows of these two strikes, this book provides a rich source of social-historical analysis of an important period in British industrial history and labour politics. Through the Grunwick Strike (which held its 40th anniversary in 2016), at a film processing plant in North London, and the Gate Gourmet strike, which took place in an airline catering company in 2005, we are connected to an exploration of “bottom-up” labour activism. The inclusion of cartoons and pamphlets, as important visual representations of the disputes, adds to the authors’ attempts to make these disputes accessible to a wider audience.

The book begins by analysing the background to the disputes and this is followed by a considered analysis of the stereotypes of South East Asian migrants in the UK, which form the backdrop to these disputes. There follows an illuminating profile of the class backgrounds and diverse migration experiences of the groups of South East Asian women in the UK at the time. These three chapters set the scene to analyse important changes in the labour market and the women’s changing positions within that in the decades before and between the two disputes.

The relentlessness of long strikes and the pressures that strike actions put on families come out strongly in chapters 5 and 6. For example, Naliniben’s feelings of shame as she addressed many meetings to collect funds during the Grunwick dispute and Parjot’s retelling of her husband’s anger and refusal to provide money to buy food for the family while she was on strike take the reader to the day-to-day reality of protracted industrial disputes. The loss of wages and sacrifices made during both disputes are palpable, just as the incidences of support and solidarity are heartfelt. As Kulvinder, a campaigner for the Gate Gourmet Gates strike, notes: “I have to play my role in this, and to do that I have to fight outside the home, and sometimes I have to fight inside the house too” (178). These and other reflections highlight not only the intersectionalities of the women involved but also the tensions that emerged during and after these lengthy strikes.

Conceptually, strike studies have had a tendency to focus on official industrial relations institutions within which strikes occur. This may be due to the difficulties in uncovering informal records that reflect rank-and-file workplace activities and/or familial and community involvement. The book highlights how women, particularly migrant women, continue to have their contributions insufficiently recorded. This is despite the fact that women have defended and continue vigorously to defend working-class standards of living. Battles over reduced working hours decades ago were often fought “behind women’s petticoats” and working-class women featured prominently in the bread riots, which pre-dated the strike as an expression of workers’ community of interest.

Similarly, migrant workers are often stereotyped as passive victims of the global economy. This book provides important critiques of both these stereotypes and provides...