The Real stories of the "Made in Dagenham" Women

In June 1968 women sewing machinists in the Ford car plant in Dagenham, Essex took a stand for equal pay in a strike that stopped production for three weeks. 

In 1984 there was another strike led by women. In this article we hear from some of the women whose stories were originally told in the film "Made in Dagenham" and the women who took part in the 2nd strike.

This article has a loose connection to my own family history too as my Uncle worked in Ford's Dagenham plant in the 1960's, and a year after the strike, he emigrated to America with his family.

The women's strike took place in the wake of serious defeats for the unions at Ford, in 1957 and 1962, when 17 stewards were sacked. It therefore represented the resurgence of rank and file trade unionism in one of the most ruthlessly anti-union firms in the world. There are many unsung heroines and heroes in the story - the women strikers themselves, the two shop stewards, Rosie Boland and Lil O'Callaghan, and the male convenors Henry Friedman and his deputy Bernard Passingham, who greatly encouraged the women. The Ford women's strike was one of the most important since the Matchgirls' Strike of 1888 and their struggle remains an inspiration to millions of women fighting discrimination and poor working conditions to this day.

The women had no previous experience of collective struggle on their own issue and were quite unprepared to take on the mighty multinational corporation which, in 1968, had an annual budget greater than that of India. In spite of this they succeeded in getting abolished their lower “women’s rate” of pay and precipitated wider action: there were other equal pay strikes that year and the National Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women’s Equal Rights (NJACCWER) was formed by women trade unionists, who organised a demonstration for equal pay in 1969. Without the Ford women, there would have been no Equal Pay Act of 1970.

Equal pay had been a confused aspiration for the trade union movement since the mid nineteenth century when women’s work was seen as a threat to male employment and bans on married women working were supported by trade unions. The Ford women faced two initial problems: it was always difficult for one section to win support from other sections on a "narrow" grading issue - Ford had introduced the new grading structure precisely in order to divide the workers. Also, as women, winning support from their male colleagues, who saw them as working for "pin money", was a real problem.

The idea of a male breadwinner bringing in a “family wage” institutionalised women’s low pay and influenced the labour movement. The welfare state was established around a conception of society in family units. Beverage said, “The attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home should not be the same as that of the single woman. She has other duties...”

It was down to women’s organising to defy these attitudes and fight for a wage that would not allow women to be used as cheap labour to bring down wages as a whole.

Dora Challingsworth, Violet Dawson, Vera Sime, Eileen Pullen, Gwen Davies Geraldine Dear, Pamela Brown and Sheila Douglass were just some of the women who took part in the 1968 strike and the 1984 strike. They tell the story in their own words - all taken from a variety of interviews and articles I found online.

"Our wages weren't for pin money," said Gwen Davis. "They were to help with the cost of living, to pay your mortgage and help pay all your bills. It wasn't pocket money. No woman would go out to work just for pocket money, would she? Not if she's got a family".

"One of the ladies who worked with me had been a machinist for [Norman] Hartnell," she says. "She'd been a dressmaker making the Queen's clothes. She went for a test at Ford and they turned her down. Now if you're working for Hartnell you must be a good machinist mustn't you? [Her brother] had been at Fords quite a few years then. He said: 'Why have you turned my sister down? She's been making the Queen's clothes and you're telling me she can't machine?' So they had her back and gave her a job".

The demand of the Ford women in 1968 was originally to re-grade their jobs from unskilled B grade to semi-skilled grade C. This demand was not won until another strike in 1984. Ironically, the Ford women had not been able to use the Equal Pay Act that they precipitated to win their re-grading, as they could not compare themselves to a man in their role; they could only claim that their skill level matched some men. 

The real cause of the pay gap between men and women was and remains women’s segregation into underpaid and devalued jobs. Just as the Ford women had to fight to prove their worth, fights in low-paid industries such as cleaning are happening and are necessary today. 

The sewing machinists at Ford made the car seat covers. It was a skilled job. Assessors inspected them on the job. Sheila Douglas said, 

“I had to do 30 seat covers an hour, we were watched over and timed. We were annoyed about the way that some people had been getting C grade for doing what we did. Why weren't we sufficiently skilled to get C grade? We had two or three votes and convenors had been down to the company management to put our case but they weren't interested. Then we had a vote to come out on strike. We were determined to show we weren't being treated properly."

At Ford there was a skilled male rate, a semi-skilled male rate, an unskilled male rate and a women’s rate, which was only 87% of the unskilled male rate. With the obvious injustice of the ‘women’s rate’ and the devaluation of the skill they brought to the job, there was a strong feeling, as expressed by Violet Dawson, from the dispute, that, “We wanted C grade, we wanted equal pay”.

The women put up with harsh working conditions. The company expanded its premises at the River Plant in Dagenham into an asbestos air craft hanger with holes in the roof. Sheila Douglas recalled:

“We used to stuff the seats with wadding. The building was two-thirds brick and above that asbestos. All these little holes used to get drafts in. We used to stuff holes in the ceiling with wadding to keep warm”

Machinists worked without guards on the needles and injuries were common. It was said that you weren’t accepted as a proper machinist until you’d been caught by the machine. The wage was small. On grade B, women earned eight or nine pounds. 

Sheila Douglas admitted it “seemed like a lot of money, because... I’d been on piece work... if I didn’t work, I didn’t earn. When we went to Fords we was on time work so whatever you done you got some wage each week…” But the money was already spoken for. Sheila was “living at home, I had to give my mum money and she needed anything I could give up.” 

Vera Sime, a fellow striker, said, “I gave my sister half my wages. She looked after my children so we had half each, that’s how we worked it”. Violet agreed, “It went in the home didn’t it, and on the children”.

Grievances about the women’s rate and their devalued skill were raised through company procedures with no success. The company feared upsetting its entire grading structure and causing resentment amongst male workers. 

Bernie Passington, convenor for the T & G union who fought for the women at the car plant, said:

“They got ignored. I went up with two stewardesses with thirteen pieces for a head rest and said to the company man, ‘Put them together’. He said, ‘Well, what are they?’ I said, ‘You should know. 13 pieces. Give them to a production girl and she knows what to do with them. That girl don’t put all those bits in a jig or anything. All she knows is she’s got to put all those bits together so at the end of it there’s a neat rolled head rest’. I said, ‘Who else does that? Nobody. ...She has to use her mind’. But you still couldn’t get anywhere with the company...".

Sheila recalled, “That’s how it was all sort of kicking off really. About the C grade and for equal rights it ended up. But originally it was for the C grade we were fighting”

Bernie said, “And in the end, like any group of workers, if they’re going to take no notice, better do something what makes them take notice”.

Sheila Douglas remembered, “We had a meeting on the shop floor and we had a meeting in the employment exchange to vote whether we would strike or not. And that’s how it happened. I don’t think it was unanimous but it was more for than against obviously because we came out on strike.” 

The strike by the women sewing machinists brought production at the Ford motor company to a standstill. 

For Vera Sime, a former sewing machinist at Ford's Dagenham plant in the 1960s, one of the epochal days in modern industrial history started like any other:

"It was like a normal work day in that I got the children ready and gave them to my sister. Then we all met at the factory and got on the coach."

The impact was huge, especially when the Ford Halewood Plant in Liverpool joined the action.

Bernie said “It shook them to the core. And being women, the mighty Ford motor company got women in dispute… It was something new. It shut the place down, they were laying people off”

Sheila: “It wasn’t the done thing at the time.”

Violet: “It frightened them.”

Sheila: “We didn’t think we were that strong.”

Violet: “We didn’t think we could bring Ford to a standstill.”

Sheila: “It was a surprise to us as well as everybody else. We didn’t think we were going to fetch the whole Ford Empire to its knees, as you might say, but that’s what happened eventually. And it was all down to us, us ladies. And we were ladies, whatever anybody else may say.”

Bernie recalled how they faced opposition from some within the T & G: “Some of our national officials weren’t all that agreed with what we were doing. They didn’t think it was right.”

The women strikers received angry letters from the public and faced opposition in the home: while Sheila’s father and Vera’s husband supported the strike, Violet’s husband opposed it. 

Sheila: My father worked across the yard from me. When we went on strike he said, "You've got to fight for what you want, Sheila. If you want anything no one's going to give it to you. You do what you want to do." So he was out of work as well as me. You did get a lot of people saying ‘What are you doing this for? You only come to work for pin money, women. Bernard told me that Jack Jones [later general secretary of the TGWU] said, "What can we give these women to get them back to work?" and then someone said, "Let's get them equal pay," not the grading. That's how we got the equal pay. There were grading grievances everywhere at Ford's so regrading the women would have cost Ford more than giving the women equal pay. I didn't want to go back to work! I wanted to stay out to get my C grade. I've always been on my own, I earn my own living, and I thought getting C grade would make a great deal of difference if and when I retired. But a lot of the women were married and their husbands and maybe other family members were working at Ford's. They were struggling, and so eventually we got sevenpence more an hour for all women in Ford, but we never got our C grade. We all felt that we deserved C grade, and we were determined that we weren't going to go back for less. If you see any bits on television where the girls are talking coming out of the gates they're saying to reporters, "We'll stay out forever!" or as long as it takes. We didn't think we were that important at the time. All we were was a handful of women who thought we deserved a better standard of pay. So we thought we'd try our luck and see what happens. It's not as if we hadn't been out on strike before. We were always in and out for this department or that. It was a known fact that Ford workers were strikers. We just thought we were coming out to try and gain C grade for ourselves and that's how it started off and it gradually got worse and worse. Because naturally you can't put a car on sale if it's not got a seat in. That's when we realised that we were more important than we thought. That's when it really struck home. I thought we should get C grade, so the equal pay wasn't that important. I don't mind it being there but I still felt we should be trying to fight for C grade - for lots of people outside Ford's equal pay was more important. The women wanted to be recognised for their skills. To get the job you needed the skills to do it, but you were classed as unskilled.

Dora was involved in both the 1968 & 1984 Strike.

 "They kept putting in wage claims which would be thrown out. That happened for two years. By this time they'd closed down different departments and Bernard Passingham had hardly any men, so he had us, and he stuck in a bit more. The union didn't want to be bothered with it. What, go on strike for women? Ron Todd [the TGWU leader] came down to take a meeting with the women and they booed him out of the plant. Every time he went to speak they booed him, because he was coming in to tell them, "Forget it this time and we'll put it in again in two years time."

It took a seven-week strike. The company didn't want to give in because a lot of people were sitting out there waiting to come in for their grade. You'd hear them saying, "I hope the women get it, because it's our turn to go in." But the women were more determined as well in 1984. They didn't get it the first time round. You're not going to be second time losers, are you?

The stewards at the time were more for the women then, even Bernard, as I said. They had to get people to do evaluations on different jobs. In the end that panel came up with we could have gone in E grade - way past a C grade. They said we could fight on longer and go up to an E grade. That's how badly we had been treated. During the 1968 strike  Rosie Boland, shop steward, and Bernard went up to Halewood to persuade the Halewood women to come out as well.

In the 1984 strike The women were in quite good spirits. They were determined. I went down on the picket and they used to get the lorry drivers in to break up the wooden palettes they put work on so they could be used on the fire on the picket line. The coal people were out on strike at the time too and they had pickets out, we had pickets out and we used to have a right laugh. A lot of the office staff used to come down and give us bottles of whisky to keep warm on the picket line.

I was ill treated by a foreman and that's the reason I went in as a steward. I went out for a hysterectomy and I came back and he put me on the end of this line where you've got to bend up and down. So I went to see the doctor and he said I'd got to come off that job. But the foreman phoned the doctor up and got him to change his mind to say I could do that job. After I was a steward I got that foreman transferred. It wasn't only about me. He could have treated other women like it, and it's not on. 

You had to be really strong. If you're right you're right. If you're wrong you've got to back away. It was funny because we had a man senior steward first who we voted in and he said, "If you do it with me, Dora, I'll do it," so I said OK. He bloody died in about a year and it was all left to me! But you couldn't do it without the women - there's your backing. The company knew that. If anything was wrong in H-building I'd only have to ask and they would stop. That's where you're strong because you all stick together. 

The company and the union were against the women. I told the union they were rubbish. One time we went up to the union headquarters at Transport House because no one was taking any notice of us. So I went up there and sat there and was told Ron Todd was busy and I said I don't care, I'm not going anywhere. In the end he sees me and he says, "I'm not having this. You just come up here unannounced and I've got to see you." And I said, "Well, Ron, if you don't like it then you'd better get your people underneath you to do their job." All men obviously. But it was great after that. Once we were at a conference and Ron had had his knees done and he was on crutches. So I said, "Whatever's up with you?" and he said, "I've had my knees done," and I said, "Well, you should have stopped begging, shouldn't you?"

We went to a school a while ago and we were talking to school children, and what I say to them is if they're going to join a union they must have a branch, go every month and hear different stories of people and what they get up to in work. You get more idea of what's going on in the world, because where else do you find that? I don't want to sell the unions because they're not always all that good, but it's somewhere to go. Otherwise get into politics and sort yourself out. Today you don't get big factories, you don't get lots of women who all work together, but they need to come together. How else do you do that?".

The film Made in Dagenham was a fair imitation of what happened. You have to give it a bit of poetic licence to make it interesting, like when they ripped their tops off, the ladies, because it's a sweatshop. But that never happened! Eileen was always swearing so that was her name. When Henry Ford came in she made a hat, she wrote "Bollocks" on it, and sat on the front machine. The foreladies were saying, "Eileen, take that hat off!" and she wouldn't. She sat there and he walked past her. Sometimes, it was a laugh. 

With Ford production stopped in 1968, the dispute was of national significance and Barbara Castle, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, intervened. The women's confidence had grown so much that during the meeting shop steward Rosie Boland raised the issue of equal pay for the first time. 

A meeting between ministers, the union and the company agreed that the company would raise wages to 100% of grade B rate over two years. The union were satisfied with this abolition of the women’s rate, and felt that the re-grading was too much to ask from the company.

But the women were not satisfied. Sheila: “There was a meeting at the labour exchange. It was put to the vote we’d get an extra 7 pence an hour on our wages and would we accept this? The union recommended we accept. Some of us argued that we came out for C grade. I voted against, but I was in a minority, so we came back to work for an extra 7 pence an hour”.

“The union worked it that some now and again got C grade. But the whole of the women never got C grade until they came out in 1984. I was really annoyed that what we came out for originally was swept under the carpet. I suppose you could say that we started off equal pay but it wasn’t equal pay really.”

The strike had illustrated the widespread injustice in the employment market between male and female rates of pay. To tackle these abuses, The Equal Pay Act was introduced in 1970. This legislation armed employees with the right to go to an industrial tribunal for equal pay with men in the same employment — but only if they were doing “like work” or if their job had been rated as equivalent but was paid at a different rate. The 1970 legislation did not give the Ford women the tools to fight for the re-grading that they originally demanded, as the only people they were doing “like work” to was themselves.

By 1984, women at the Ford car plant still experienced harsh conditions, with no guards on the needles and damage to hearing by machinery noise. All the women were in the union, as there was a strong woman rep who backed them up.

In 1983, the “Equal Value Amendment Regulations” passed as an amendment to the Equal Pay Act. The European Court of Justice had found that UK legislation was not sufficient to provide for equal work for equal value for all employees. The new legislation gave women the right to go to an employment tribunal on a new ground: that they felt their work was of equal value to men in the same organisation. The women at Ford used this to challenge Ford’s discriminatory job evaluation scheme, but the employment tribunal ruled against them and turned down their appeal in 1984. With their renewed hopes once again unfulfilled by the law, the women at Ford took strike action in December 1984.

There was a meeting in the canteen to decide on the action. Geraldine Dear, who was involved in the 1984 action recalled, “We shocked management. They thought we’d all walk out of that canteen and walk back into work.”

Management tried to undermine their strike by smuggling their work out through back fences, which the women organised to prevent. The women’s action was helped by solidarity from their male colleagues. 

Dora said, “They had train loads (of work) coming in. But the men wouldn’t do it. Give ‘em their due. They did stand by us.” Geraldine admitted, “We did feel awful. A lot of men were very upset. They had families as well and they got laid off. But we had to stick up for what we thought was right.”

The women organised pickets. Another striker, Pamela Brown, said, “We mainly did nights.” 

 Geraldine added, “My husband worked for British Rail so he knew what it was all about. I had him to look after my little one during the night.” They set up a big tent, sang and listened to the radio through the night. They had a chant: “Ford sewing machinists are like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed shit.” The women stayed out for nine weeks.

Their strike stopped production and, with nobody working, delayed the year’s pay claim. Trade unions wanted a quick resolution. The women found themselves against both the unions and management.

They were brought into arbitration through ACAS, who set up a panel to examine the grading system at Ford. All the male C grade jobs were evaluated and compared to the sewing jobs. They looked at the many inbuilt discriminatory features of the job evaluation scheme, which awarded points for features of men’s jobs, while not recognising features of women’s jobs. The panel ruled that women’s speed and dexterity was unequalled in the company and that it had been significantly undervalued. 

Their ability to fix their own sewing machines and piece new designs together without training was finally acknowledged. The panel ruled that the sewing machinists’ job should be graded as grade C.

Management had the audacity to call the women to a meeting and announce that they were awarding the new grade almost like a gift. The women felt that this was an insult to the two strikes and almost twenty year wait they had endured to win this. Their job had not changed. 

They had simply received acknowledgement of their worth, which they had known all along.

Made in Dagenham is a 2010 British film directed by Nigel Cole. The film stars Sally Hawkins, Bob Hoskins, Miranda Richardson, Geraldine James, Rosamund Pike, Andrea Riseborough, Jaime Winstone, Daniel Mays and Richard Schiff. It dramatises the Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968 that aimed for equal pay for women. The film's theme song, with lyrics by Billy Bragg, is performed by Sandie Shaw, herself a native of the area and a former Ford Dagenham clerk.

Made in Dagenham was nominated for four awards at the 2010 British Academy Film Awards; Outstanding British Film, Costume Design, Make Up & Hair Design and Supporting Actress (Miranda Richardson).

 A musical adaption of the film opened on 5 November 2014, at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Scripted by Richard Bean, and directed by Rupert Goold, it starred Gemma Arterton in the lead role.

The TUC has produced a series of films about the fight for equal pay. They include oral history interviews with women and union representatives involved in some of the major equal pay cases since 1968.Watch and hear the women tell their stories below & watch a "behind the scenes" video on the making of the movie.

 TRAILER FOR "MADE IN DAGENHAM - THE MUSICAL 

THE STORY BEHIND THE MUSICAL