HISTORY
Pamphlet No. 12
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Equal Pay for Equal Work: 1968 Dagenham Ford Machinists Strike and Beyond
Britain’s Road to Socialism The new edition of Britain’s Road to Socialism, the Communist Party’s programme, adopted in July 2011; presents and analysis of capitalism and imperialism in its current form; answers the questions of how a revolutionary transformation might be bought about in 21st Century Britain; and what a socialist and communist society in Britain might look like. The BRS was first published in 1951 after nearly six years of discussion and debate across the CP, labour movement and working class. Over its 8 editions it has sold more than a million copies in Britain and helped to shape and develop the struggle of the working class for more than half a century. Other previous editions of the BRS have been published in 1952, 1958, 1968, 1977, 1989 and 2000 as well as multiple substantially revised versions.
Series editor: Graham Stevenson Published by the Communist Party June 2013. Copyright © Communist Party 2013. ISBN 978-1-908315-24-3 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Cover image: Women sewing machinists at the Ford Dagenham plant voting to strike in 1968
HISTORY 1
Our History No. 12
Pamphlet No. 12
New Series
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Equal Pay for Equal Work 1968 Ford Machinists strike and beyond CONTENTS page Introduction Communist Women lead the way The ‘60s - battle for Equal Pay kicks into gear Watershed moment - ‘68 Ford Machinists strike Equal Pay as a major political issue The fight still continues... Sources
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Introduction Only an estimated 11% of women workers had formal equal pay with men, even by the late 1960s. One-third of the entire labour force— over eight million women— were underpaid by means of a startling device of paying workers simply according to their gender. Yet women were now starting to go to work after a long period of enforced home-working that followed the end of the 1939-45 war. They were entering the labour force at the rate of 10,000 per month; but “some seven out of eight-and-a-half million women workers do a full-time job for less than £9 10s 0 a week” at a time when the average male manual weekly wage was over £16 a week. [January 1965 CP Women’s Bulletin] This situation was not for the want of trying to improve things. The notion of equal pay had been raised many times during the 19th century but when women replaced men in massive numbers during the First World War, the case for it seemed unassailable. Many struggles for equity by women broke out but the strongest was the mass strike by women in London’s trams, buses, and tubes, which spontaneously erupted in August 1918, spreading across the south of England and the Midlands. A pay award had been given to the men who still remained in the industry but, outrageously, not to the women. So strong was the demand for equity that the multi-union National Transport Workers Federation had even committed its affiliates (most of which would go on to found the TGWU four years later) to "immediate appropriate and determined action" to enforce national adoption of equal pay for equal labour to women and men. Despite the stunning success of the strike, which saw over 20,000 women take action, only muted progress was eventually achieved after negotiations (by male officials) ensued. Although, like the men, the women eventually received an extra five shillings (25p, maybe a 15% increase) special war bonus, the principle of equal pay was not actually conceded and, in any case, things were reverted back to how they were and fast. As the men returned from the trenches most of the women were dropped from employment. One of the strikers, Nellie Usher, then aged 36, had been Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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widowed by the war early on and had taken work as a bus conductress. Her experience in the strike radicalised her for she joined the newly-formed Communist Party shortly afterwards and launched herself into a life-time of trade union militancy. It was her generation, Communists. Socialists, radicals, and plain trades unionists, whose daughters learned from when the next war came along; this time, they vowed, real advance would be attained.
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Communist Women lead the way Communist Tamara Rust was the key organiser in 1941 of a project to extend women’s rights through a voluntary “Women’s Parliament”. A number of regionally based bodies took off, including one in London. That ‘parliament’ saw 345 women attend the first meeting on July 13th. Tamara also produced two pamphlets during the Second World War – “Here women enjoy freedom!” for the Russia Today Society and "Equal Pay for equal work" for the Communist Party. Tamara Rust-Phillips (1963)
At this time there were many outstanding women Communist shop stewards in engineering and allied workplaces, such as Peggy McIver (Standard Telephone), Nell Coward (Liverpool Royal Ordnance Factory), Agnes MacLean (Rolls Royce plants in Scotland), Anne Wheeler (London engineering) and Flo Mitten (Manchester factories) and Peggy Stanton (Convenor, West London Aircraft). The Communist-led Shop Steward National Council called the first ever rankand-file conference of women union stewards in London on 5th October 1941 and another in Birmingham in April 1942. One of the developments that emerged from this strong push for equity was the founding in 1943 of an Equal Pay Campaign Committee. The following year, a Royal Commission on Equal Pay was established but the majority report only accepted the possibility in teaching and some civil service grades but effectively saw the notion dropped.
Muriel Rayment, a leading Transport & General Workers Union (TGWU) shop steward at EMI in West Middlesex, was one of the nationally recognised campaigners in the fight for Equal Pay. She spoke for her union at the TUC congress in October 1946, to condemn the General Council for failing to deal with the reasons why women left industry after the war. For her part, she was quite clear that the key reason was the lack of equal pay, Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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coupled with the closure of wartime day nurseries. A personality of outstanding charisma, Muriel was virtually a one-woman show in the struggle in what was a totally male dominated union. A colourful, hard-swearing, and larger than life character, she made a point, as she put it, of never allowing a man to say that he could do something she would not or could not! One of the first women to sit on the general executive council of the TGWU, representing all engineering workers, Muriel was an Executive Committee member of the Communist Party. In common with a large A 1944 CP pamphlet makes the case number of members of the T&G GEC, and for equal pay as more women many full-time officials, Muriel refused to sign entered the workforce to increase the Declaration of Non-Membership of the war production Communist Party, imposed by the cold war bans ushered in by Arthur Deakin, the T&G General Secretary, after an ambiguous discussion at the union's conference. Muriel Rayment lost her seat in the union's highest council from 1950 simply because she refused to leave the Communist Party and the fight for equality in what would soon become the largest union faded until at least the 1980s. Muriel Coult was an active Communist in the Civil Service Clerical Association (today part of PCS, the Public and Commercial Services Union) who was described as being a "woman who had shown exceptional energy on the Youth Advisory Committee". She was elected to the CSCA's National Executive Committee in 1937, a position she held until 1944, when she became a full time official, but was marginalised within the union after right wingers captured the union in 1949. A government purge of employment by Communists as civil servants didn’t help! Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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However, this did not stop Muriel Coult playing the leading role in organising the union’s campaign for Equal Pay. The campaign was started on 11th February 1953 with a debate on Equal Pay in the House of Lords, moved by Lord Pethick-Lawrence, who had played a part in the original suffragette movement. On Valentine’s Day 1953, Muriel delivered a huge card, with an Equal Pay slogan on it, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Muriel urged union members to collect signatures in homes, offices, special meetings, factory gates, shopping centres, and anywhere else. Some 700,000 signatures were presented in a petition to the House of Commons in March 1954. A Civil Service Equal Pay agreement was reached on 18th February 1955; some thirty-five years after the House of Commons first approved the principle of Equal Pay in the sector. It was introduced in stages, which was meant it would not be fully operational until 1st January 1961. Even so, Equal Pay disputes continued. In 1959, a "Typists’ revolt" broke out, after it was discovered that the few male typists employed in service were earning 25% more than the women typists at the Treasury. Delays in addressing this grievance led, two days after the August Bank holiday in 1959, to a thousand, manly young women, marching down Whitehall, singing and chanting as they went, gathering in a meeting in Horse Guards Avenue.
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The ‘60s - battle for equal pay kicks into gear Communist women were a pretty tough bunch, judging by the anecdote provided by the Communist Party’s new National Women’s Organiser, Margaret Hunter, previously the Scottish organiser. By 1963, when she was appointed to the national role, the Party’s work in industry took a particular focus towards women’s rights and equal pay. Hunter’s article in the May 1964 edition of Marxism Today, then still a long way from being the strange journal it would become, was a clear indication of a major shift in the Party’s thinking about women at work. In due course, the Party developed the research in this into a formal Memorandum, which it sent to the UNO Status of Women Commission, and copied to all British MPs. [http://www.unz.org/Pub/MarxismToday-1964may-00145] Ever since the early 1950s, the AEU engineering union had been trying to achieve the male labourer's rate for women, in the teeth of bitter opposition from the engineering employers. Some progress had been made in that women in engineering covered by the relevant national agreement with the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions (CSEU) were paid 92% of men's wages—in 1962 that had been only two-thirds of men's wages. Even the Women’s TUC (itself a newishly returned concept) was now stirring: “Up till recent years, Conference has had the attitude that married women are more or less working on sufferance and should therefore be grateful that they are allowed to work at all.” Communist women thought it was time “some new tactics (were) devised, (or) we night wait another 80 years”! [1964 CP Women’s Bulletin] Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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Local activists such as Willie McQuilken, Paisley District Secretary of the AEU and a prominent local Communist, promoted long-running equal pay fights at Scottish plants, such as Rolls Royce and Pressed Steel. Marion Mellor in Coventry, who had joined the Party in 1961 at the age of 48, was an engineering inspector in the AEU in Coventry. She told Margaret Hunter that she had "found your article in Marxism Today very useful. We had a discussion on Equal Pay at the Trades Council last Thursday and I based my contribution on the information in the article". This was now being circulated to a vast range of union bodies. [1964 CP Women’s Bulletin] The right to equal pay for equal work was even mentioned favourably in the 1964 Labour Party election manifesto, "The New Britain", which promised that: "We shall implement a Charter of Rights for all employees, (including) ...The right to equal pay for equal work." Since then the trade union movement had been pushing the relevant minister. “The government is dodging the issue and betraying the working women”, declared the CP’s women. [CP Women’s Bulletin March 1966] The sluggishness and unresponsiveness of Labour politicians, left unchallenged, would have never seen movement on the issue had not Communist Party’s women grasped the bull by the horns. A new spurt of activity resulted after the Party told its women activists “the need now is to bring pressure to bear through trade union branches and committees to the TUC”. [June 1966 CP Women’s Bulletin] In 1966, Leeds Trades Council organised a huge conference on equal pay, at the request of its Women's Advisory Committee. There were even "girls mainly from tailoring shops in Leeds, who came along and paid at the door”. [CP Women’s Bulletin November 1966]
Phyllis Davies (left) pictured in 1979 with her partner Derek Robinson (right), fellow Communist and convenor of Austin Longbridge plant, on a demonstration against his sacking.
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In Birmingham, Phyllis Davies, a shop steward at the BLMC factory in Longbridge, was a member of the National Party Women’s Campaign Committee and was now busy setting up a local campaign. One union branch with a lot of women members at EMI in Hayes, on seeing the Equal Pay folders, had set up its own committee on Equal Pay and was going to leaflet local factories, reported Elsie Moody. Bessie Leigh wrote that Letchworth Trades Council had set up an Equal Pay Campaign Committee and the establishment of Paisley’s District Equal Pay Committee had been prompted by the engineering union. [1967 July CP Women’s Bulletin] Christine Page had got her Trades Council to discuss equal pay and to agree to a further discussion to decide on action. [1967 Sept CP Women’s Bulletin] Work to ensure that the 1968 Women's TUC at Folkestone on April 23-26 gave a new lead to the movement for Equal Pay paid off. The Communist Party decided that this still needed more backing up by activity in workplaces and in communities. Edith Staniforth reported from Nottingham that factory gate meetings had led 550 copies of the Party’s Equal Pay folder being sold. “Some Labour Party people have bought a dozen at a time, and Nottingham Trades Council bought two dozen copies." This had led to the establishment of a broad Equal Pay Committee. One branch in Kent alone took 500 copies of the folder to distribute door-to-door on one particular estate. [CP Women’s Bulletin April 1968] Not only were the Party’s women now pushing hard on equal pay, the entire infrastructure of the Party was faced with the need to do something. The Communist Party’s National Conference on Factory Organisation in June 1966 could contemplate the fact that there were 213 factory branches, albeit that 34 were not properly functioning. [CP Political Committee - 29th February 1968] The Party had been organising at Dagenham for 25 years and had dozens of shop stewards and scores of members there, including Sid Harraway, the national chair of the Ford JSSC, when the sewing machinists’ strike broke out at Ford Motor Company Ltd that summer. Some ultra-leftist sources, especially those from the, later, women’s liberation movement – and even retrospective establishment comment Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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seem to want to bracket the Communist Party with right-wing bureaucratic luke-warmness about the Dagenham women. Some of this appears to either deliberately or ignorantly misunderstand that the role an individual Communist can take is entirely dictated by the mass organisation they represent not by their own personal opinion. Some sources simply ignore the Communist Party, as if its hard work on the issue of equal pay was irrelevant to the wider struggle. To be more firm about this; contrary to the hints of some organisations without members at Dagenham, all of Fords' shop stewards gave the women support and organised factory collections for them. A statement issued by the Engine Plant, Foundry and K-D Shop Stewards on June 19, 1968 said: "The basic causes of this dispute are discrimination on basic pay and grading against our female members." Where the real problem came was that the reality was that politicians and personnel (‘human resource managers’) were more worried about how the upgrading would breach statutory pay policies along with the preservation of established procedure agreements. Paying more money was not so much a problem per se but opening up a challenge to a two-year settled agreement by a small group of women was unthinkable. Communists, however shallow the commitment by some men of any or no political party might or might not have been, were unquestionable opposed to statutory pay restraint. Much of this was rooted in high politics. An economic crisis had emerged as the pound was seen as over-valued and capital began to flow alarmingly out of Britain. In July 1966, a six-month wages freeze was agreed between the TUC and government. Then the pound was devalued and prices began to rocket, causing workers to rebel against the policy, with the result that by the end of 1968, the unions had completely rejected legislation that restricted collective bargaining. In a sense, the Ford women were pushing at just the right time and in the right place and they surely sensed it. But none of this was purely the spontaneous work of a few uncelebrated women, as both the ultra-left and Hollywood would have it. Much Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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preparation and propaganda had been going on for some years before. Nonetheless, this was one of those watershed moments that seem to open up the possibility of real change, in this case for women's rights at work. And the Dagenham women were somehow special in their sense of unity and determination. An added factor was that paying women less than men, in a structured way whatever the nature of the work, simply because they were women, was a core belief of Ford USA, which was totally hostile to the policy. It had once eventually conceded the equal pay principle, during the Second World War. But, once the returning servicemen reclaimed their jobs, Ford USA simply stopped hiring women until the 1970s and in the UK a similar policy applied except in special areas – fabric machining was one of them.
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A Watershed moment - ‘68 Ford Machinists Strike In 1967 Ford introduced a job evaluation scheme covering all workers at its gigantic Dagenham plant. In retrospect, it is easy to see that the scheme was deliberately engineered to be discriminatory to women workers, who wholly worked on manufacturing car seat covers. The mechanism whereby this occurred was by grading jobs in such a way that easy comparison was not highlighted. Ford’s previous pay structure for manual workers had provided a skilled male rate, a semi-skilled male rate, an unskilled male rate and a women’s rate of about £8, which was only 87% of the unskilled male rate. The regrading exercise had seen the women's jobs graded as less skilled (down from Category C to B) than many of the men. A: unskilled B: slightly skilled C: skilled production D: skilled craft E: highly skilled craft But that discrimination existed was abundantly clear to the women if not to others. To add to the insult, working conditions for the women were simply appalling. The extension to the River Plant in Dagenham where the women were put was basically an asbestos filled aircraft hangar, which had holes in the roof that needed to be stuffed with fabric to keep the heat in. Whilst the women worked without guards on the large sewing needles, leading to a view amongst them that you could only become a proper machinist when the machine had caught your fingers up and sewed them together! Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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Why, Communist women wondered, was Ford so “agitated at the prospect of paying an extra 5d an hour” to the women? “They could well afford the £155 a week it would cost. Last year they made £11 million profit: this equals £178 per employee … Last year £6 million was taken out of their £100 million reserves to increase dividends. They receive £10 million every year in investment and other Government grants. Clearly the directors and shareholders of Fords and their wives enjoy a luxury standard of life from the work of men and women employed by the firm [August 1967 CP Women’s Bulletin]. Agitation around these notions helped build up indignation amongst the women and a strike eventually began on the 7th June 1968. Doing without the machinists work on car seats for the thousands of cars which were produced daily was simply impossible, so very soon no completed cars were leaving the plant. The 187 women at Dagenham and the 195 women at Ford's Halewood plant in Merseyside were implacable from here on in arguing that they were as skilled as male paint spray operators. Many of them had worked as tailoresses and dressmakers, in other words as skilled workers in the clothing industry. Fords even obliged a test of competence before taking the women on. The stoppage actually halted the whole of Ford’s production since, due to the linked-up nature of production, with one plant building the chassis, or the body, another the engine or assembling. As stock ran out, within weeks the woman had come close to stopping vehicle production at all Ford's UK plants entirely. Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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The women’s main shop stewards were Rosie Boland and Lily O'Callaghan but the system of representation then followed meant that the convenor, or senior steward, for these and some other stewards was Henry Friedman and his deputy Bernard Passingham, who actually handled most of the work relating to the women and was completely supportive. In later years, Passingham, for a long time a member of the T&G executive, recalled that Ford’s industrial relations officer asked him at Barbara Castle’s office what it would take to settle it. “… all I could say was ‘equal pay’ … because that had been driven into me by Frank Cousins and Jack Jones.” Despite the generality of support, some leading trade unionists on the Ford National Joint Negotiating Committee did see the strike as challenging their role. But the AEF (the then short-lived new name for the engineering union) executive backed it as an equal pay struggle but not as a grading issue. The National Union of Vehicle Builders (NUVB), of which 135 of the Dagenham women were members, dithered, although its local officer was strongly supportive of the women, as we shall see. (The NUVB became part of the Transport and General Workers' Union in 1972. Although the T&G played little or no role in the 1968 dispute, in later years it would strongly celebrate the Dagenham women.) Women trades unionists throughout the country began a massive campaign of support for Dagenham. Only days after the strike had begun the Party’s Women’s Department was urging its women activists to shift gear into heavy support. “So long as they can keep the women on lower rates, it is not only a source of extra profit from the women, but a lever to hold back the general level of wages. The courage and determination shown by the Ford women is an example to the whole trade union movement in the fight against the Government's Incomes Policy. THE WHOLE MOVEMENT SHOULD RALLY IN SOLIDARITY.” Messages of support and donations, or requests for collecting sheets were urged by the national bulletin and it was Lily O’Callaghan who the CP women were directed to. [CP Women’s bulletin 1968] The strike ended after three weeks in a deal that immediately increased pay Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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to 8% below that of men, rising to the full category B rate the following year. A Court of Inquiry, set up under the Industrial Courts Act of 1919, considered the re-grading, although this failed to find in the women’s favour. The inquiry, chaired by Sir Jack Scamp, decided that the dispute was not about equal pay but about the grading of sewing machinists. An internal review committee with an independent chairman was recommended and, to the machinists’ dismay, this eventually confirmed the grade B rate. The women were only finally re-graded into Category C following a further sixweek strike in 1976. Nonetheless, the entire political establishment was also now rocked by the event and the issue of equal pay took centre stage. As Rose Boland, a strike committee member, was widely reported as saying: “I think the Ford women have definitely shaken the women of the country”.
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Equal Pay as a Major Political Issue A key concern in the establishment was the view that Britain, now that it could no longer rely on captive markets in the Empire, needed to look elsewhere and the question of matching the standards operating in competitors and potential markets in mainland Europe arose. The International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency dealing with issues of international labour standards, was the main standard bearer for good employment conditions. Today, 185 out of 193 UN members take part in the ILO; there were less back then and even less nations followed ILO Convention 100 on Equal Remuneration. The Convention, signed in June 1951 and coming into in May 1953, had been signed by over 50 countries, including the main originating components of what was to become the European Union, which also followed the principle in its founding treaty. Britain did not sign the Convention until June 1971. Worse still, the pay gap was slowly widening. A written answer in Parliament on 29th November 1967 revealed that the difference between the average of men's and women's pay in April 1966, was £10 6s. 7d. and by April 1967 this had increased to £10 7s. 5d. (The hourly rate difference had gone from 3s. 6½d to 3s. 7d.) Moreover, since the Second World War, all governments had used formal state restraint on pay and the 1964-70 Labour Government had increasingly relied on this. Not only was there the main problem that shareholders simply sat on dividend increases - which were buried internally in companies as retained profit - only to be paid out later on, which annoyed unions as collective bodies. There was the problem that pay restraints operating over time tended to distort differentials between one class or skill of labour and others. Introducing equal pay scales, especially introducing equal pay for categories of work that were arbitrarily declared to be of less worth to the employer than others was a minefield of industrial relations. Left Labour MPs, including Lena Jeger (19 November 1915 – 26 February Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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2007) the MP Holborn and St. Pancras South, had introduced amendments to their Government’s latest attempts refresh pay policy along the lines that standstills on wage increases “awarded solely on the principle of equal pay for equal work” in line with Convention 100 would not apply. This put pressure on the government to begin considering the question Especially as Barbara Castle (6th October 1910 – 3rd May 2002) was not only Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity in Harold Wilson's government but she Women bus workers demand equal training was also First Secretary of State, rights to become bus drivers (1968) making her a key part of the government. The action of the Ford women now pressed parliament and Castle called the women in for a meeting. Although the press were called to this historic event, once they had left, Barbara Castle actually donated £10 (a fair sum then) to the Ford women’s hardship fund and opened her drinks cabinet! Equal pay was seen to be an idea for which the time had arrived. Women employed by London Bus now demanded the right to be trained as bus drivers, since back then there was not a single woman behind the wheel. The first one qualified in 1972 (pictured) but there were only a tiny number of women drivers until, in the late 1980s, recruitment of women began to bite seriously. Now one in eight London bus drivers are women.
Jill Viner was the first ever permanent woman bus driver in 1972
Even the Daily Mirror cheered on the women, the “petticoat strikers” [Daily Mirror 2nd July 1968] The TUC rightly now argued for equal pay for equal work of equal value whilst the employers’
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organisation, the CBI, was at least forced to say it wanted the same pay for exactly identical work. But there was also heavy political pressure from employers now being heavily put on the Labour government not to rock the boat. In response, the National Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women’s Equal Rights (NJACCWER – but more usually known by the shortened form of NJACC, or ‘n-jack’) was set up in September 1968. Although Margaret Hunter, of the CP’s King Street Women’s department and Julie Jacobs, the Party’s London district industrial organiser, were full members of the committee and in many ways NJACC appears to have been the Party’s creation, the few leading women trades unionists then around were also associated with the body. As in many spheres, the Party’s leading role seemed to be quietly valued by the trade union movement. Fred Blake, the Ford women’s officer and still the Dagenham area organiser of the National Union of Vehicle Builders, was NJACC secretary. Even the TUC fell in line, with Jack Jones of the TGWU pressing it hard on the issue. A TUC conference on Equal Pay was held in November 1968 – a highly unusual event. The NJACCWER campaign held an equal pay demonstration attended by over a thousand people in Trafalgar Square on 18th May 1969. As soon as the New Year was in, a major article analysing the slowness of pace on the issue was in Labour Monthly, then the leading analytical journal for left-Labour/ Communist unity in the unions. Christina Page “the longest outstanding wage claim in Britain’s history” [January 1969 Labour Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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Monthly] Following this lead, CP women kept up the pressure with sympathetic voices inside Labour. Led by Jean French (later Jean Crook), a deputation of fifteen women, organised by the CP London Women's Advisory Committee, met Mrs. Joyce Butler, Labour-Co-op MP and a long-term local politician in Wood Green, to discuss equal pay. [CP Women’s bulletin No2 (1969)] French was an AEU convenor in a South London switchgear factory, and a member of the union’s National Committee and Women’s Committee. Chair of the Women’s Advisory Committee of the Party, she was a member of the editorial board of the Party women’s journal, ‘Link’ and had moved the motion on equal pay at the Party’s congress in 1969. The Party saw this initiative of hers as exemplary and urged every district to follow suit. She told the Party’s congress in November 1969 that the “Government's plan for a six-year delay before granting equal pay cannot be justified … the struggle for equal pay was becoming a major battle in which the maximum amount of unity could be won. She warned that workers could not sit back just because Mrs. Castle says she is going to introduce legislation particularly when the legislation will be for equal pay for equal work, not work of equal value. {Morning Star November 17th 1969] The Leeds Citizen newspaper gave two columns to a report of the Women's TUC by Beryl Huffinley. This had stressed the importance of the recommendation adopted by the Women's TUC Lobby on equal pay. First the Party, then the Ford women, and finally NAJACC had exploded the issue in front of the wider labour movement and the world. Things would never quite be the same again in the unions, although a further struggle remained to force unions to open up their committees and conferences to women. Unfortunately, Fred Blake had to resign as NJACC Secretary due to pressure of union work in mid-1969. [NJACC minutes 5th July 1969] Although he agreed to carry on until someone else could be found. In the meantime, Audrey Wise (later to become a left Labour MP) agreed to be Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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Corresponding Secretary. Rose Boland, one of the leaders of the Ford women, was also a member of the committee but was often prevented by domestic duties from attending meetings and herself formally resigned in July 1969. [NJACC 24th July 1969] Nonetheless, NJACC kept up the pressure, booking a room for a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference on Thursday October 2nd 1969. The London section of the organisation booked a coach for NJACC members to lobby the delegates. In the run up to this, an “Equal Pay Day” was proposed by NJACC for Friday 12th September 1969. Although there was £84.3.7d in hand, a not inconsiderable sum, this was by no means nearly enough to finance the projects that the committee had already agreed. Speakers invited to the event were Mrs Welsh (Coventry), Mrs Gorton (Nottingham), Mrs Staniforth (Nottingham – a long-standing Communist), Jesse Stephen (Bristol) and Joan Maynard (Yorkshire, and who would later become a left MP). Christine Page (a Communist and later a TUC general council member). The big car factories of the Midlands were now being pulled into line by the Party’s “Motors Advisory”. Joe Lynch, a Birmingham convenor, had been successful in getting the workers at the British Leyland Group to agree to hold a conference of several hundred shop stewards and wanted a NJACC speaker. Whilst the TGWU had now taken a definite stance in equal pay at its Biennial Delegate Conference, as Julie Jacobs pointed out at the NJACC committee; this raised the possibility of a sea change in attitudes to the issue. Castle now rushed through a Bill; separate women’s rates of pay were made illegal, although employers were given five years to get their act together. The Equal Pay Act 1970 only came into force in 1975, when the hourly pay gap for full time women workers was 30%. Despite the backsliding, this had come directly out of the Ford women’s struggle. For the first time, Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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inequality between men and women in terms of pay and conditions of employment was declared illegal. But this was also one of those watershed moments. Inside the Communist Party, a lively debate began to open up about the role of women and this trend was replicated in all walks of life as women now began to find their collective voice. The number of women working mushroomed from this Morning Star remoment onwards. By 1994, it was evident that for the port on debates previous two decades, the proportion of adult women taking place in who were economically active had risen massively, while the CP (1973) that for men has declined. The trends were rightly expected to continue into the next century and by 2006 the economic activity rate for women was projected to have reached 75 per cent: By 2008, a record number of women were indeed employed, but half of them worked part-time, compared to one in six men. Some 13.6 million jobs were filled by women, and a similar amount held by men. But the problem of job segregation now surfaced, whereby women’s work was focused in particular, under-valued, sectors. In Ford’s, the procedure agreement, grading grievance had to be raised and Economic activity by gender (Source Employment resolved each year before the Ford Gazette April 1994) annual wage and conditions negotiations, which itself became a benchmark for many manual work pay talks in the period. Although this much delayed progress on the issue of Ford's sewing machinists, they started to look at their grievance all over again in 1980. A new requirement had been put to the women. They would have to renew and repair their machines when they suffered wear and tear Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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without a grading increase. They were even being begged to work on Sundays - at double-time pay. But, when it became clear that this would be under the less skilled rates, all the women refused this. The Ford sewing machinists submitted equal value claims in early 1984, under the Equal Value (Amendment) Regulations of 1983, arguing that their jobs were of equal value to paint spray operators who were in grade C. In the run up to Christmas 1984, the machinists took strike action once again, threatening once again to bring Ford’s UK plants to a standstill. An ACAS enquiry ensued, which finally Ford Machinists on strike in 1984, 16 years after their original dispute (Source The T&G Story, Anput the machinist jobs at grade C drew Murray) level. The original work study assessment had not taken into account that, while the sewing machinists did not work from engineering drawings, they had to “visualise the finished seat cover when working on it inside out”. The visualising of 3D components from 2D drawings and also account for the level of physical effort and the pace of work easily placed the women’s work on a par with men who needed to employ less skill to earn more money. Long before 1968, sewing machinists at Ford’s instinctively knew that. It had taken them sixteen years to get the world to accept what they knew from practical knowledge.
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The Fight Still Continues... There are those who would date the late 20th century wave of feminist activity to 1968 and even specifically to the Ford women’s dispute of that year. During the 1970s and 1980s, arguments about the response of the labour movement and even of the Left to the new mood of women grew apace. Whilst its analysis of capitalism’s tendency to divide and rule by age, nationality, ethnicity, race, and above all by gender became sharper and clearer, in learning the lessons of Dagenham in 1968 for the 1970s, the Communist Party argued against separatist notions. For “by attacking the trade unions and portraying them as the enemies of Students on an Equal Pay demonstration organised women's democratic demands it by the TUC in the 1980s creates divisions which would weaken the struggle for these demands, because it would alienate both men and women trade unionists instead of winning then to use the organised strength of the movement to tackle the very pressing problems confronting women. To be successful with their demands, women must receive the help and support of the whole trade union and labour movement. A crucial factor in this is the number of women who are won for membership of, and participation in the trade union movement. [Jean Styles, “Women, the unions, & work” CP Women’s Department report (1972c)]
Strikes and occupations now preoccupied most organised workers but a new feature was that large numbers of women took action not just as part of a wider struggle but on their own part. Leeds women clothing workers took strike action when their union accepted a pay offer in industry negotiations that maintained discrimination against women. Some 30,000 women marched out of 45 factories. This event was later made into a BBC film Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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play. ‘Leeds - United!’. The demand for a gender-neutral increase was unfortunately side-lined by the union, the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers. Some two hundred women silk screen printers at the GEC Spon Street works in Coventry, earning a basic £13 per week, came out on strike when the introduction of new materials lowered their piece rates. There were attempts to break through the picket line and a picket was knocked over by a vehicle. Although the women were members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, they received little initial support from the plant convenor, due to fears of widespread layoffs and factory closure. They were supported by the AUEW District Committee and finally accepted a management offer in February 1974. In 1976, an equal pay strike at the Trico windscreen wipers factory at Brentford Middlesex was supported by the women’s union, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. But a strike of 21 weeks was needed to win the same basic rate as make fellow workers. The world of work and the role of women in society changed in many ways in the next quarter of a century. In the process, nearly all women became expected to be at work but most of the roles assigned to them hardly changed. A few more women than previously entered solid professions but soon learned the meaning of the phrase ‘glass ceiling’. Some of the sewing machinists from 1968 - Sheila Douglass, Vera Sime and Bernie Passingham, the convenor - presented with the Breakthrough Award by the Wainwright Trust in 2006. Also honoured were four of the women who concluded the Ford equal pay struggle 16 years later, T&G senior shop steward Dora Challingsworth, Geraldine Wiseman (formerly Dear), Pam Brown and Joan Baker. But the struggle for equal pay was by no means done and dusted. In the public sector, more agreements to flatten differential pay scales came across the problem of judging equal work for equal value and this culminated in the local authority sector with women winning test cases obliging major Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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Men and women trade unionists on an Equal Pay demonstration in Birmingham (2010)
readjustments and significant pay outs, even as recently as 2012 progress was being achieved in this regard. As for the Dagenham women, they became feted as they each progressively neared retirement. A film dramatisation of the 1968 strike, Made in Dagenham, factually only loosely based on the whole struggle was released in 2010. Arguably, the emotional commitment of the movie did honour the collectivity and the steadfastness of the women, despite its aching need to observe Hollywood conventions. In 2010, according to the Fawcett Society, women working full-time earn on average 17% less per hour than men working full-time. For women working part-time compared to men working full-time the gap is 36% per hour – rising to 45% in London. Even a staid establishment body like the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has reported that: "Girls born (in 2013) will face the probability of working for around 40 years in the shadow of unequal pay." After more than 40 years of equal pay legislation, Britain has one of the worst gender pay gaps in the developed world. Women in the UK are paid 79% of male rates, while across the 27 countries of the European Union the figure is 82%. In 2012, the Fawcett Society proposed that Wednesday 7th November be UK Equal Pay Day in the UK. There have been a range of special days set aside in history to mark equal pay but this was seen as marking “the point in the year when women in effect start ‘working for Equal Pay for Equal Work - ‘68 Ford Machinists and beyond
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nothing’ compared to men, as the gap in pay between women and men means on average for every £100 men take home, women are getting £85 – a 14.9 per cent difference.” [Fawcett Society: http:// www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/equal-pay-day-2012/]
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Sources ‘Link’ (CP Women’s Bulletin) Spring 1979 Andrew Murray “The T&G Story” L&W (2008) Chartered Management Institute Daily Mirror cutting 1968 Eric Wigham The history of CPSA Eurobarometer. Hansard, “Increase in length of standstill under Prices and Incomes act 1967”, Prices and Incomes Bill, Clause 3, HC Deb 26 June 1968 Vol 767 cc479-572 479; debate on Amendments HMSO Report of a Court of Inquiry under Sir Jack Scamp into a dispute concerning Sewing Machinists employed by the Ford Motor Company Ltd, London (1968), British Parliamentary paper. Cmnd.3749 Jean Styles “Women, the unions, & work”, CP Women’s Dept report (1972c) Microform Academic Publishers/ Archive Trust of the Communist Party Morning Star Office of National Statistics. Sarah Boston “Women Workers and the Trade Unions” (1987) TGWU GEC minutes – to check The Fawcett Society: http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/equal-pay-day-2012/ The National Archives: PREM13/2412 Ford Dagenham TUC “A Women's Worth: the story of the Ford sewing machinists” - notes by Sue Hastings TUC “The story of the Ford sewing machinists Recording Women’s Voices: an oral history project on equal pay” DVD TUC Library Collections, London Metropolitan University www.unionhistory.info
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Books available from Manifesto Press Communist Party History Group The education revolution Cuba's alternative to neoliberalism by Théodore H. MacDonald £14.95 (£2 p&p) 265pp Illustrated. ISBN 978-1-907464-02-7 Published in co-operation with the National Union of Teachers with a foreword by Christine Blower, Bill Greenshields and Martin Rees. The singular successes of the Cuban education system are treated to a deep, comprehensive and fraternal analysis by Dr MacDonald, the world authority on human rights and a sharp critic of contemporary imperialism. The book covers with great authority Cuba’s innovative education system, from pre school and primary education, through the secondary and tertiary sectors, the experiences of the pioneering literacy programmes and the comprehensive nature of adult education. He locates the children’s Pioneer movement, the day care system, school and community relations and specialist, technical and vocational education in the framework of Cuba’s distinctive pedagogy. Granite and Honey The story of Phil Piratin, Communist MP by Kevin Marsh and Robert Griffiths £14.95 (+£1.50 p&p), 256pp illustrated. ISBN 978-1-907464-09-6 This pioneering new biography tells the story of Phil Piratin, elected Communist MP for Stepney Mile End in the post-war General Election that swept Labour to office on a radical manifesto. The book reprises the commanding role that Piratin played in the 1936 Battle of Cable Street against the fascist Blackshirts. For the first time in print, it shows how he sent a mole into the British Union of Fascists on that day who provided Piratin with invaluable information. This book also recounts Piratin's tenacity as the MP who helped expose numerous colonial massacres, including the infamous Batang Kali case in Malaya. Piratin also tabled a Private Member's Bill in Parliament which prefigured the vital health and safety at work legislation of future decades. Building an economy for the people An alternative economic and political strategy for 21st Century Britain Edited by Jonathan White. Contributions from: Mark Baimbridge; Brian Burkitt; Mary Davis; John Foster; Marjorie Mayo; Jonathan Michie; Seumas Milne; Andrew Murray; Roger Seifert; Prem Sikka; Jonathan White and Philip Whyman £6.95 (+£1 p&p) ISBN 978-1-907464-08-9 Based on the policy agenda of Britain's trade union movement it analyses what is wrong with the British economy, arguing that the country's productive base is too small, that the economy has become too financialised and that power has become concentrated on a narrow economic fraction based in the City. It insists on the importance of a strategy that can boost spending power among the British people, begin to narrow the widening inequalities in British society and raise the standard of living and build a new, democratised public realm that insulates people from dependence on volatile financial markets.
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