Transcript for: Facing discrimination at work and in the pubs

Interviewee: Mohan Sokhal

Subject: Discrimination

My brother was already here, he was in Huddersfield in 1953 or 54, very early. He just encouraged me to come over here, even though I already had a job over there. I was actually encouraged by him by letter to come over here, I thought it would be a better life in England, rather than in India, so I came over here in 1966. I did not expect to work hard in this country, and the first job I got here was in textiles. Everybody in Huddersfield in those days was mainly in the textile area. I did not like the job so I moved on to some other job, that jobs was very hard, I used to work the night shift, five nights a week; I�d sometimes do a lot of overtime.

But soon after I settled here, after a year or two, I noticed, talking to other people - mostly Indians and Pakistanis - that even in the workplace they had a lot of discrimination going on. Employers were using people just like slaves. They never said, but you could tell by body language. So I was very upset. In this country, I did not expect this; people are not dealing with us with dignity. So there was a lot of discrimination in the workplace and in other places, like in pubs, at that time. Because there were no families, very few families, only men back then. They wanted to talk when they came back after work, they wanted to talk to some of their friends, and the only place at that time to get together was pubs. When I started going to pubs, there was a lot of discrimination, you were not allowed to go in the separate room, and we were only allowed to go where theres a lot of smoking going on. If we tried to go in their room, they'd say no, you can�t go in there, it's only for English people. I realised that it's something wrong in the system, so we set up an Indian Workers Association to work in the interests of our people against this discrimination. We set up the Indian Workers Association; it's a very good organisation, its still going on, and I was for many years the general secretary. Actually it was already in existence, but I joined it in 1967 or 68, as more and more people were coming from the Indian subcontinent, the number of us was growing. So we set up the Indian Workers Association and we worked for the people; there were a lot of people coming, who couldn't speak English, and they had some problems finding jobs, they didn't know they had the right to benefits and other things. So we set up a small office in the Springwood area near the Punjab store at that time. Then, as the community was growing, the membership increased. It was a very democratic association, every two years an election took place.