Heroines of the picket
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1557459,00.html
Rahila Gupta
Saturday August 27, 2005
The Guardian
In the 80s, a favourite media stereotype was the "passive" Asian woman
who walked five feet behind her man. So we were grateful to have the
alternative example of Jayaben Desai, who, in protest at compulsory
overtime, walked out of the Grunwick film processing factory and into
the history books. That was 1977.
Since then, history has delivered us a surfeit of working-class Asian
women heroes at the forefront of actions against poor wages and
conditions, union recognition, casualisation and privatisation.
Examples include the Chix bubble gum factory strike in Slough in 1979,
the Burnsall strike in Birmingham in 1992, the Hillingdon hospital
cleaners' stand against privatisation in 1995 and the Lufthansa Skychef
catering-company strike in 1998. At 17 months, the Skychef action was
the longest-running in British industrial history. It also has many
parallels with the Gate Gourmet dispute at Heathrow airport.
Rahila Gupta
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/c81474da1038e5f2
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