Two hours there, service will do and they can go easily because many people was on picket line. So every two hours, we were calling one person and one hour before time, another two person will come and then two people will leave after one hour. So continuous, the picket line was there.

The workers elected a strike committee and agreed formal demands, a central one of which was formal recognition of their union at the plant, apex. Soon, nearly 150 workers had joined the strike and Grumwick retaliated by firing all of them with the company offering to rehire them only if they gave up their demand for union recognition. The apex then requested support from the main UK union federation, the trades union Congress, TUC. At that time, solidarity action was quite a common thing. It wasn't that we had our Lord like it is today. And so all the workers started to think about how they could build solidarity from workers. Solidarity or sympathy action as it's sometimes known was common before the 1980s in Britain, when workers were much more likely to win disputes. It refers to when one group of workers walk out on strike in support of another group. Banning solidarity action was one of the main tools used by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in the 1980s and 90s to create the situation we have today, where the working class is much weaker and more atomised. This ban was never repealed by Labour once they regained power. After the dispute began, not much happened at first in terms of intervention from the official trade union movement. Initially, there was very little reaction. But after they went round, actually talking to people in the workplace, that made a huge difference. Also, the unions were not really able to conceive of the situation where no paid workers in a search shop would side back, they just

were not

able to comprehend. They saw how you moved forward. But then the groundwork workers had an idea. They thought of directly approaching rank and file workers

and had

this big tour around the country.