Historic British trade-union strike poster calling for a mass rally and picket after eight months of dispute. 8 months on strike

Historic 1978 trade-union poster supporting striking workers at Garners Steak Houses in London during a long dispute over union recognition. Workers at the restaurant chain began industrial action on 26 January 1978 after management refused to recognise membership of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, the TGWU. Eighty-four workers were dismissed after joining the strike, many of them migrant and low-paid catering employees. By October the dispute had reached its eighth month, and this bold screenprinted poster called supporters to a mass rally and picket on Saturday 7 October. Participants were told to assemble at 3pm at Speakers’ Corner, Marble Arch, before marching to Trafalgar Square. Speakers were advertised from the Garners, Grunwick and Sanderson strike committees and TGWU Region No.1, deliberately linking several prominent industrial struggles of the period. Garners had been strongly influenced by the 1976–78 Grunwick dispute, where mainly South Asian women fought for trade-union recognition, dignity and better conditions. At Garners, sustained picketing reportedly reduced restaurant trade substantially, but maintaining daily lunchtime and evening pickets across the West End required wider labour-movement solidarity. The poster was produced by Paddington Printshop, the radical West London community print workshop founded by John Phillips and Pippa Smith, whose screenprints publicised political, workplace and community campaigns. The Garners dispute continued until June 1979 and ultimately failed to secure recognition, yet it became an important example of migrant workers organising in the poorly unionised hospitality sector. This surviving poster records late-1970s battles over collective bargaining, low pay, job security, union membership and the right of workers to organise, while its huge red lettering captures the urgency of mass picketing and solidarity politics in a turbulent era of British industrial relations.