Equal Pay Act 1970. Here's to Rita O'Grady and the Dagenham Girls.

[oldbadger]

Equal Pay Act 1970. Here's to Rita O'Grady and the Dagenham Girls.
55,000 men were employed at Fords Dagenham Works in the late 60's. Only 187 women worked there as upholstery machinists.
When the Ford Motor Company downgraded the Dagenham Girls (machinists) to 'unskilled' grade, thus affecting their pay, they went on strike, and held out against the might of Fords and significant Union and Government pressure 'not to stir up trouble'.
Rita O'Grady stepped forward to serve the Dagenham machinists' interests, and their efforts lead Minister Barbara Castle to push for the Equal Pay Act, which was passed in 1970 and followed soon after by most other Western Countries.
Obviously there is much more detail to the history than I can remember, but If you're interested in the history and would like to watch a brilliant movie about working life in the East End in the 60's, look out for 'Made in Dagenham' on dvd ......... I don't know what regions it is available in.

 

[dust1n]

Oh, finally got a second to look this up, since I didn't recognize any of it, so I thought I'd throw this in for the Yanks like me.

"Strike action
The strike, lead by Rose Boland, Eileen Pullen, Vera Sime, Gwen Davis, and Sheila Douglass, began on 7 June 1968, when women sewing machinists at Ford Motor Company Limited's Dagenham plant in London walked out, followed later by the machinists at Ford's Halewood Body & Assembly plant. The women made car seat covers and as stock ran out the strike eventually resulted in a halt to all car production.

The Dagenham sewing machinists walked out when, as part of a regrading exercise, they were informed that their jobs were graded in Category C (less skilled production jobs), instead of Category B (more skilled production jobs), and that they would be paid 15% less than the full B rate received by men.[1][2][3] At the time it was common practice for companies to pay women less than men, irrespective of the skills involved.[4]

Following the intervention of Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity in Harold Wilson's government, the strike ended three weeks after it began, as a result of a deal that immediately increased their rate of pay to 8% below that of men, rising to the full category B rate the following year. A court of inquiry (under the Industrial Courts Act 1919) was also set up to consider their regrading, although this failed to find in their favour.[5] The women were only regraded into Category C following a further six-week strike in 1984 (source BBC documentary broadcast 9 March 2013).[6]

Impact
Inspired by their example, women trades unionists founded the National Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women's Equal Rights (NJACCWER), which held an 'equal pay demonstration' attended by 1,000 people in Trafalgar Square on 18 May 1969.[7]

The ultimate result was the passing of the Equal Pay Act 1970, which came into force in 1975 and which did, for the first time, aim to prohibit inequality of treatment between men and women in terms of pay and conditions of employment.[8][2][4][9][10] In the second reading debate of the bill, the machinists were cited by MP Shirley Summerskill as playing a "very significant part in the history of the struggle for equal pay".[11] Once the UK joined the European Union in 1973, it also became subject to Article 119 of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which specified that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work.[12]"

Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia