In memoriam: Karen Harrison

‘An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.’

If Dr Martin Luther King’s dictum is indeed true, then it follows that those who fight injustice anywhere are worthy of the respect and goodwill of others everywhere. It is in this spirit and with a heavy heart that I step away from African issues for a week to mourn the passing of someone who spent the better part of their life fighting the often insidious injustice of unequal and unfair labour conditions here in the UK.

Last week, the world lost one of those special people who dedicated their whole lives to fighting battles that the rest of us are relatively comfortable looking away from. Karen Harrison, a fellow student, passed away in circumstances that are yet to be determined, leaving behind a legacy of struggle for labour equality and especially workplace equality for those who work on the British railways.

She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to working-class parents and I imagine even then that she was already exhibiting that trademark stubbornness that would feed into some of her most amazing achievements. At 16 she left school to work in a nightclub before deciding that she wanted to learn how to drive trains, something that no woman in Britain had done before. Knowing Karen, I imagine her thought process was less about making history and more about doing something that people around her consistently told her that she could not and should not do. Although initially reluctant, to their credit the company eventually let her have her way, even if from the way she told the story it was with the expectation that she would fail.

During her first years with British Rail, Karen endured a great deal of harassment and verbal abuse from her co-workers and her superiors. In a world of armchair feminists who preach equality from the comfort of their plush offices, Karen lived the struggle every day for almost 20 years, each day carving away at her co-workers’ resentment and earning their begrudging respect. She learnt to turn their insults back at them, but without the bile that often underpins chauvinism. Eventually, her perseverance won them over, and she was elected as a trade union officer for UNISON, the largest union in the UK. It was a job that she worked hard at and enjoyed, and only a debilitating illness made it impossible for her to continue. Realising that only a higher education would allow her to return to her campaign for labour rights, Karen joined the University of Oxford to study law as a mature student at almost 50 years of age.

Anyone who knows anything about Oxford will tell you that it’s the kind of place that is half-comprised of people that you respect and admire, and half of people that you spent the better part of your younger years trying to avoid. Many people opt to fall back on national, regional, schools-based or other ‘tribes’ to navigate through the muck, but Karen was never one to support such nonsense. A friend to everyone and loved by all, she was as comfortable trading good-natured jibes with public school snobs as she was sharing war stories with working-class people from other parts of the world. Her illness made what is already a demanding programme extremely difficult for her but she was never one to complain. She had an infectious joie de vivre that put everyone at ease, even while she herself was in pain or drained from her medications.

As someone who has consistently walked away from the label ‘feminist’, meeting Karen was an important step towards my reclaiming of the label. Karen recognised that it was the same spirit of injustice that fuelled gender or class issues, and spent her life fighting injustice wherever she found it, and that ‘feminism’ should avoid being so married to doctrinal notions that it precludes recognition of other forms of injustice or inequality. To me, she epitomised the ideal of anyone struggling for justice anywhere – a keen sense of where her own shoes pinched but a great deal of empathy for those she was often struggling against.

Most importantly, Karen’s formidable spirit and refusal to accept defeat was an inspiration to everyone who knew her. Surrounded by much younger people already jaded and disillusioned by the trajectory of their home nations, Karen’s consistent belief in the goodness of people and the value of the struggle against inequality was a reminder that optimism doesn’t have to be blind to be effective. To me, she was a friend during some of the most difficult moments in my life, a yardstick against which I measured my own disinclination to take chances and to live life to the fullest, and an inspiration to continue in my chosen struggle even when other people think I am insane.

On hearing of her passing, a mutual friend noted that it’s difficult to be sad when we think of Karen passing, because almost every memory we have of her is of her making us laugh or saying something irrefutable. So we mourn her loss and console her family, but in her spirit, we find ourselves hoping that there’s no inequality on the other side, because if so, St Peter must be getting an earful.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Karen Harrison (1960–2011)
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