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Articles

Striking Narratives: class, gender and ethnicity in the ‘Great Grunwick Strike’, London, UK, 1976–1978

 
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This article explores the ways in which dominant narratives and images constructed the industrial dispute that took place between 1976 and 1978 at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in Britain's capital city, London. Since 1978, this strike has achieved almost mythic status in British labour history, as the moment when the trade unions supported the demands of minority women workers. The authors argue that the dominant narratives and images disguise the complexity of events and the diversity of the strikers, constructing a narrative of success and celebration, even though the strikers were not re-employed.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Arts & Humanities Research Council, which supported this research as part of its Diaspora, Migration and Identities programme, and Jennifer Morrissey, then a PhD student at Oxford, and the librarians at the TUC Library, London Metropolitan University and the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick for identifying photographs and documents in the archives. We also interviewed five ex-Grunwick employees and strikers and we would like to acknowledge their generosity in talking to us.