Business as usual.

The struggle against sexual harassment at work.

By Sue Denham




Audrey White’s dispute with Lady at Lord John Liverpool 1983



Forty years ago, a clothing shop manager in Liverpool, Audrey White, took a stand against the
sexual harassment by male management of the female staff she managed, when she
complained to her manager she got the sack. Against all expectations, she won that dispute,
which led eventually to a change in the law to protect women workers from this kind of abuse,
and also a recognition by unions that they must take sexual harassment seriously, that this form
of coercion and bullying must be combatted However it was not until 2005, more than 20 years
later with the passing of an amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, that a legal
definition of “harassment” was set out in law.



The owners of Lady at Lord John, Werff, refused to recognise or negotiate with the TGWU, so
Audrey White and her family and supporters decided to organise a picket of the shop in
Liverpool and urged the public to boycott the firm’s shop. Picketing the shop proved to be a
good tactic as the company was gearing up for a launch of the newly refurbished interior and did
not reckon on White and her supporters being there all day, every day for five weeks from late
April 1983.



Aided initially only by her friends, family and the trade union movement, she was joined by many
sympathisers and managed to overcome a large and wealthy company, backed as it was by the
state, utilising the Thatcher government’s anti-trade union laws. Her opponents did not even
scruple at taking out an injunction against Audrey, her father and brother and the union TGWU
(now UNITE) for a quarter of a million pounds, which if successful, would have left them
homeless and destitute and would also threaten to sequestrate the assets of the TGWU.
Audrey’s fight was so extraordinary, so brave and so stunning was her victory against such
overwhelming odds, that in 1987 a film directed by Lezli-An Barrett was made, loosely based on
her experiences “Business as usual”, starring Glenda Jackson and John Thaw, although
Audrey herself would say that it is not the film that is important so much as winning that dispute.
If it had been lost, how many tens of thousands of women workers would now have had to suffer
in silence as they were sexually harassed at work? It is also no exaggeration to say that Audrey
standing up against sexual harassment was in many ways a precursor to the of the “Me Too”
movement.



Today after thirteen years of Tory austerity, with the cuts to health and social services placing
ever more burdens on hard pressed women workers, to fill the gaps in the provision of care that
those cuts have created and with job security almost nonexistent for most women workers. The
film demonstrates Audrey’s resistance and the contempt that capitalism shows to women
workers. It was truly inspiring, a struggle that has given us an example from which we can learn
vital lessons in our struggles today.



The dispute at Lady at Lord John did not drop from a clear blue sky. 1983 was a year of great
social strife in Britain, as the Thatcher government, elected in 1979, had led attack after attack
on sections of the organised working class, attacks that would find their highest expression the
following year in the great miners’ strike. The city of Liverpool was also at the centre of many of
those attacks, with large employers closing their doors and many bitter strikes taking place.
The city had been in economic decline since the late 1960s with the local working class paying
the price for the capitalists’ failure to invest and modernise. Unemployment levels were among
the highest in the country, and job vacancies were scarce. In July 1981, typists employed by
Liverpool City Council went on strike. During that six months’ strike, the 450 women workers
struggled tirelessly to win their battle. The courage and commitment of these women workers,
who had hardly been involved in union activity before, was an example to all.



At the time, it was the longest strike by white collar women workers in the UK. In early 1983, the
Croxteth Comprehensive School was still being occupied and run by the local community with
approximately 350 children attending at its height, there was a high level of class struggle taking
place in Liverpool and women workers were playing a prominent role in those actions. On April
23, 1983, the dispute at the Lady at Lord John store in Church Street, Liverpool began
completely unexpectedly. Audrey White had been the manager of the store for less than three
months; she was a long-standing Labour Party activist and the sole member in the shop of the
TGWU union. She was no rabble-rousing trouble-maker. Lady at Lord John was the female
clothing offshoot of a chain of originally men’s clothing shops, Lord John, that had begun in
Carnaby Street London in the late 1960s, supplying high quality fashionable clothes at the top
end of the market.By 1983 it numbered nationally nearly 300 menswear and over 200 ladies
clothing outlets it was sold to Next in the mid-1980s, when they became Next stores.
The shop itself had just had a facelift, as the company was now to invest money into
diversification into women’s clothing, confident of profitable returns. Thus the relaunch of the
newly refurbished shop coincided with their dispute with their manager over the sexual
harassment of their staff.



While the shop itself had received extensive remodelling, the same could not be said for the
uniforms of the approximately a dozen female members of staff. Although they were given a
choice of clothes that they were compelled to wear in the shop which were supplied by the
company, despite being heavily discounted they were of poor quality and the staff had to pay for
them out of their wages.When the women highlighted the contradiction between a newly
revamped shop being staffed by assistants in poor quality clothing on Saturday 23rd April the
area manager offered to examine their uniforms. He then made unwelcome suggestions to a
number of the young women, pulled one woman’s bra strap down, lifted up skirts of others and
made personal comments.



It was then that four members of staff felt that the area manager had so physically overstepped
the line that they complained to their manager, Audrey White. She complained to the area
manager, telling him not to behave like this and not to treat the staff that way.
The following Monday management phoned Audrey and told her she was sacked, refusing to
give any reasons. When Audrey carried on working as she had been given no written notice or
reason for dismissal, the management then called the police and she was removed from the
premises by the police. Audrey had only been at the boutique for three months, and therefore
could not take the firm to an industrial tribunal. Instead, she took the only effective course open
to her: she called in her union the TGWU.



On the following Saturday, men and women trade unionists picketed the shop. Placards
explained the situation, although sexual harassment was at that time much more widespread,
some managers seeing it almost as a perk of their job. The term “sexual harassment” was not
well known, as so little had been done to eradicate this misogynistic practice. It wasn’t easy for
the pickets to find a form of words that would convey what the staff were being subjected to.
On the initiative of outraged passers-by, a petition calling for Audrey’s reinstatement was
started, with three thousand signatures collected on the day. people queued up to sign. The
picket was so successful that, it is estimated, the shop was losing nearly £6,000 worth of
business a week. On the following Monday, the union was invited to a meeting with
management and an offer of money to Audrey to end the dispute was made, which she refused.



The pickets continued. At one point,some three weeks into the dispute one Saturday afternoon
the police arrived with a police van and the pickets were ordered out of Church Street.The
police arrested everyone on the picket line, seven men and a young schoolgirl were shoved
into the police van They were taken to the police station, held for five hours and charged with
obstruction The pickets were all imprisoned until around 10 o’clock at night. It was only after
MP’s Eddie Loyden, Bob Parry and Eric Heffer attended the police station and called for their
release that they were released from their cells.The pickets had all been shoved into a police
cell and the young school girl who was only around 16 years old was strip searched in a cell
with the cell door open.



None of the male pickets got similar treatment and given the nature of the dispute this could
only be seen as a provocation by the police: a young woman protesting against sexual
harassment being forcibly sexually harassed herself. Not surprisingly, an official complaint was
then taken out against the police by the parents of the young girl.She eventually won her
complaint against the police and she was advised that the police responsible would be
disciplined. Not unexpectedly, it was later heard that one of them had actually been promoted.



The picket began to attract support from local Labour councillors and the local Labour MP’s,
Eddie Loyden, Bob Parry and Eric Heffer as well as prospective parliamentary candidates, and
it received wide publicity in the local papers and regional TV and radio. Daily picketing, which
obviously included Audrey White’s family and people from organisations as diverse as the
Kirkby Unemployment Centre and local MPs, was effectively a challenge to the law on
secondary picketing brought in by the Tory Employment act 1982.







Thousands more names were collected on petitions and very few customers crossed the picket
line. The TGWU picket was made up of predominantly male members from the docks and car
works as well as unemployed members from the unemployment centres who supported Audrey
White, which shows the real value of unions maintaining the unemployed in trade union
membership and involving them in the activities of the union.



“We picketed six days a week, all day, getting thousands of people to sign our petitions and
boycott the shop,” Audrey said. And it was successful, because, as she added, “nobody crosses
a picket line in Liverpool.” The response of the public was overwhelmingly sympathetic.
There is no doubt that the vast majority of working people in Liverpool felt that it is about time
the bosses understood that women workers would not tolerate sexual harassment. Many shop
workers and office workers explained when signing the petition outside the shop, that they too
had experienced sexual harassment at work. Support from the general public was so great that
15,000 signatures were eventually collected on the petition calling for Audrey’s reinstatement.
The company who owned the shop chain, Werff, then tried to cut their losses by offering Audrey
two alternative jobs in their other stores, one in a small shop in Liverpool, and another in a shop
in Warrington. She had no hesitation in refusing these: they represented a wage cut of £50 a
week and demotion.



If she had accepted, it would have implied fault on her part, so nothing short of reinstatement
would have ended the dispute at this point. The employers were clearly on the back foot and
reeling from the effects of the solidarity shown and the support Audrey was receiving from the
union and the public. Eventually the company was forced to concede when their attempt to get
an injunction against Audrey, her family and the T&G union for liability of £250,000 of punitive
damages failed, ironically itself claiming “molestation” when it came before the High Court in
London although the injunction wasn’t defeated in the high court it was defeated by solidarity.
The pickets had signed to say that they would picket legally but as soon as they returned they
were back on the picket line and spread the action across the country. So they were picketing
illegally. In other words they broke the law and actually won the dispute because they stepped
up the action of picketing the Lady at Lord John stores in Manchester and London. Before then
the dispute was a stalemate.



Despite using the police, the state, the law and the courts in the most vicious and unscrupulous
way, the company was unable to force one woman worker to submit, because she had on her
side the support and solidarity of the trade union movement. The outcome was talks between
senior management and the TGWU was Audrey being fully reinstated without loss of pay.
The union made no concessions to management whatsoever and secured a total victory. It was
won by the determined efforts of TGWU 612 branch and the Liverpool labour movement,
despite management’s attempts to intimidate the pickets into submission. The victory
represented a great step forward for all shop workers, for whom sexual harassment is just one
aspect of bad working conditions, and showed the value of joining and being active in a trade
union.



Audrey White was reinstated as manager. But alongside her, there was still the same area
manager, whose conduct had provoked the strike, as well as the shop manager who was in
place during the dispute.



When Audrey returned to work she was still unable to take her complaint to a tribunal, she
hadn’t been there long enough. However, with the assistance of the Equal Opportunities
Commission and the union that had become involved again she was able to threaten to claim
constructive dismissal because of the harassment she was now subject to. Eventually, an
agreement was arrived at, which involved the removal of the area manager and two others.
Moreover, around the same time, all charges against the seven arrested pickets were dismissed
in court and for the first time in history the union’s costs were awarded against the police in a
court of law.



Audrey fought forty years ago and won, and her fight led to a significant improvement in the
working conditions faced by women. She is still fighting to this day and addressing other women
workers, she would urge them to join that fight, even if at this moment in time they feel you can
only take the smallest, most modest step.
.


“Join a union, get active, if we don’t fight, we cannot win.”