Some of the women behind the legendary Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968, which paved the way for the introduction of equal pay legislation in the UK, are to be honoured later today (Monday) by equal opportunities charity, the Wainwright Trust.
The ex-sewing machinists from 1968 - Violet Dawson, Sheila Douglass, Vera Sime - and Bernie Passingham, the T&G convenor who helped them win their pay fight against the car manufacturer, will receive the Wainwright Trust’s Breakthrough Award presented annually to the unsung heroes and heroines of the equal opportunities world. Also being honoured are three of the women who concluded the Ford equal pay struggle 16 years later, T&G senior shop steward Dora Challingsworth, Geraldine Wiseman and Pam Brown.
And, with the help of generous funding from the Trust, the TUC is to ensure that the memories that the women have of those heady days in the late 1960s are not forgotten. An oral history film - made for the TUC by film-maker Sarah Boston - is to be the first piece of footage stored in the newly launched TUC equal pay oral history archive.
The personal stories of the women will be the first of six films to go into the TUC archive. The next - due to be shot later this month - will be of the women cleaners who successfully won equal pay for work of equal value through comparing their work with groundsmen at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast in 1995.
The TUC hopes to seek additional funding to develop the archive into a comprehensive resource for researchers keen to delve deeper into the struggle for pay parity since the legislation was introduced over 30 years ago.
The Ford sewing machinists were among the first women to challenge the discriminatory pay systems which, before the 1970 Equal Pay Act, saw women, both in the public and private sector, generally being paid on separate, lower rates of pay. The women who made the seat covers in the Ford factory earned only 92 per cent of that paid to the unskilled men who swept the floors, and just 80 per cent of what the semi-skilled men took home.
The women, angry that their employer was not taking their claim for equal pay and regrading seriously, took industrial action, and as cars could not be sold without seat covers, rapidly brought production at the Dagenham plant to a halt. Following a meeting with Barbara Castle, the then Secretary of State for Employment, the dispute was resolved.
So impressed was Barbara Castle by the case put by the sewing machinists that she pushed for the introduction of the Equal Pay Bill, which became law in 1970 (though it didn’t come into force until five years later). But the dispute about unequal pay at Ford didn’t end until 1984, when a second generation of sewing machinists finally won their claim for equal pay for work of equal value.
TUC Deputy General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: The women of ’68 and their union convenor are the unsung heroes of the equalities world. Their insistence that they would not put up with being paid less than men doing similarly skilled jobs launched the equal pay struggle that we are still fighting to win today.
Although the gender pay gap in the UK remains one of the largest in Europe, the fight that the Dagenham women started, and the legislation their action helped introduce, has enabled thousands of women to win equal pay cases against their employers. And with the setting up of the TUC equal pay archive, we can ensure that their memories of these pioneers will be with us forever.
Susanne Lawrence, Chair of the Trustees of the Wainwright Trust, said: David Wainwright was a true pioneer in the field of equal pay in the UK and the Trust is therefore delighted to be able to play such a key role in setting up an archive which will recognise the importance of some of the major cases in which he was involved and the women he helped.
Equal pay heroes honoured
.
