GMB Magazine GMB25 Candid Summer 2016 | Page 7

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FORCE FOR CHANGE
Jayaben Desai faces the police
on the picket line in 1976.

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Hard lessons

LEARNT

40 years on from the Grunwick dispute,
Paul Kenny looks at its lasting legacy

G

runwick changed the way that
unions thought about race, the
best way to organise among the
immigrant communities coming
to Britain in the 70s, and the way unions
thought about the law.
It also warned of the coming storm. The
ruthlessness and contempt shown by our
foes; their use of private, ad hoc companies
to break the strike and – for perhaps the first
time – the savagely political use of policing to
target strikers. A decade later, they’d come to
dominate industrial relations, when Margaret
Thatcher and Keith Joseph came to power.

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©Andrew Wiard

INSTANT DISMISSAL
Conditions at the Grunwick film
processing plant were appalling.
Management were bullies. Overtime
was imposed at s