48 years after the Equal Pay Act, companies are still finding ways to pay women less, as Carrie Gracie’s case against the BBC revealed. Anna Blake investigates the complexities of gender and pay today.
In this centenary year of the Representation of the People’s Act — when some women, those aged over 30 who met specific property qualifications, were first granted the right to vote — much has been made of how far we have come.
The 1968 Ford women's strike was a landmark on the way to equal pay. Sabby Sagall recalls the dispute and its effects.
On 7 June 1968 women sewing-machinists at Dagenham took on the mighty Ford Company over sex discrimination in job grading. The strike had a huge impact, forcing Ford’s to its knees and feeding the growing calls for women’s equality in the workplace and beyond.
The 2010 film of the dispute, Made in Dagenham, has now been adapted into a stage musical starring Gemma Arterton as the worker who leads the strike.
Julie Sherry reviews the new musical telling of the Ford women's struggle
Made in Dagenham the film is excellent, but the collective experience of the musical — watching the performers live and alongside thousands of others — blurs the separation between a powerful but historical story and the live debates we are having in austerity Britain today.
This was amplified watching the show in a week in which some 700,000 workers, mainly women, had struck and 100,000 had marched over low pay. Sitting in the theatre you couldn’t help but wonder how many public sector workers were in the audience and how they might be feeling.
The female workers among Birmingham's refuse collection staff have been underpaid for years. They rightly put in equal pay claims and claiming for back pay, and this can range from £30,000 to £60,000 each. It should have been dealt with years ago, but it never was.
So the council had two choices: to bring the women's wages back up to our level or drop our money, which is exactly what they have done. It's loaders on the refuse collection side who have lost, ranging up to over £4,000. The drivers on refuse collections didn't lose anything. On my side of the council, the street clean team, it was our drivers who lost money, up to £3,000, but not workers like me who are considered street sweepers. We didn't lose anything.
Director: Nigel Cole; Release date: 1 October
It's 1968 and 187 female machinists at the huge Ford Dagenham car plant in east London vote for a 24-hour stoppage in a dispute over grading. Employed to sew seat covers in a dilapidated building where the roof leaks, the women decide upon action when they are regraded as unskilled while male colleagues doing similar work are classified as semi-skilled.
The film Made in Dagenham portrays the 1968 strike of women workers at Ford. Dora Challingsworth and Sheila Douglass spoke to Sabby Sagall and Sheila McGregor about their experiences during the strikes.
Dora Challingsworth (left) and Sheila Douglass (right)
