Made in Dagenham

Made in Dagenham

Made in Dagenham is a film about a group of 186 sewing women who go on strike to due to the fact that that they were class as unskilled (Grade B) and wanted to be re-graded to semi-skilled (Grade C). But the main problem was the fact that they were being paid 85% less wages than the unskilled men.

At first, the union did not support the women strikers. Divisive tactics had often been used by employers to keep male workers from supporting an increase in women's pay. The women of Dagenham said that union leaders did not think much about losing 187 women tolose out of thousands of workers. However, they remained strong and were joined by 195 more women from another Ford plant in England. The women had no previous experience of collective struggle on their own issue and, on the face of it, were quite unprepared to take on the mighty Ford multinational corporation which, in 1968, had an annual budget greater than that of India. But the strike brought Ford's entire car production to a standstill.

Equal pay became one of the strikers' key demands. The 1970s saw other equal pay strikes, the most famous of which was the 1976 Trico strike, at a Brentford factory making windscreen wipers. The National Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women's Equal Rights was formed by women trade unionists, organising a 1,000 strong demonstration for equal pay in 1969. The 1970 Equal Pay Act armed women with the right to demand equal pay with men doing "like work".

The Dagenham strike ended after Secretary of State for Employment, Barbara Castle met with the women and took up their cause to get them back to work. The women were awarded a pay increase, but the re-grading issue was not resolved until after another strike years later, in 1984, when they were finally classified as skilled workers. Working women throughout the UK benefited from the Dagenham women's strike, which was a precursor to the UK's Equal Pay Act of 1970. The law makes it illegal to have separate pay scales for men and women based on their sex.