Made in Dagenham: The Truth

A few weeks ago, I went to see Made in Dagenham, that rare thing, a film with employment law themes in it. Like most films that are ‘based on a true story’, some characters were amalgamated and some issues were simplified in order to make the messiness of reality easier to understand. I make no criticism of this – if I was making a film, I would do exactly the same – but I always leave the cinema with a desire to do some research and find out what really happened.

In this case, my conclusion is that one important aspect of the film was made unnecessarily rosy. Before the credits rolled, there was a suggestion that other industrialised countries followed the example of the United Kingdom in passing the Equal Pay Act. During the film itself, an American Ford executive is seen threatening to move the factory elsewhere if equal pay is introduced. In fact, as with most discrimination legislation, this country lagged far behind its Western allies. For example, France introduced equal pay for women in 1946, only two years after it had given them the vote, and equal pay formed a key plank of the original Treaty of Rome in 1957. Even the United States introduced an Equal Pay Act in 1963. Although Ford eventually decided to abandon Dagenham in favour of Germany, in 2000, this had nothing to do with employment law in the two countries which, if anything, is more favourable to employees in Germany. It was because of the higher productivity of the facilities at the Cologne factory.

However, to be fair to Barbara Castle, it would also not be quite correct to say that the Equal Pay Act was only passed in order to facilitate membership of the European Community. Only months before the Dagenham machinists strike, Charles de Gaulle had vetoed United Kingdom membership for a second time and negotiations did not begin again until Edward Heath was elected in 1970.

I have more sympathy with the decision of the writers to boil down two different pay disputes into one to make it easier for a general audience to follow. On the other hand, people interested in employment law should be able to handle the full version. The straightforward direct equal pay issue arose from the fact that women were paid 87% of the rate of men in same B grade, which was allocated to unskilled workers. However, the sewing machinists also felt that they were semi-skilled workers who should be paid C grade rates. Indeed, this regrading would have been worth more money to them than equalisation of their pay with men and, for many of them, was the main grievance. Ironically, therefore, equal pay was not the main motivation for all of the women in taking part in the strike.

Though it was not necessarily seen in quite this way at the time, from a modern perspective, it is clear that grading was also an equal pay issue. The women had to pass tests to prove their proficiency in using a sewing machine, which put them in the same bracket as C grade paint sprayers. They were paid less than equally skilled men for work of equal value. The only possible reason why the machinists were paid at B grade is that they were predominantly women.

This leads to the final irony. Although equal pay for like work was introduced at Dagenham, no regrading took place. The Equal Pay Act itself did not help in this respect either because it also dealt only with like work and not with work of equal value. The victory was not complete until two events of 1984, a second strike at Dagenham, which led to a regrading to C grade, and new legislation to require equal pay for work of equal value, by a reluctant govenment which had been taken to the European Court of Justice by the European Commission. As usual, the United Kingdom was lagging a long way behind the rest of the world.