By Maggie Fenwick, Unison Health
Two strikes, twenty five years apart, but over the same issue. As part of our celebration of International Women’s Day, Maggie Fenwick gives a short account of two of the most celebrated strikes for equal pay for women.
Rolls Royce Equal Pay Strike 1943
At the outbreak of World War II, the National Service (Armed Forces) Act dragooned women over the age of 20 into military or munitions work. Being a conscientious objector was not considered reason enough to avoid this work and even having children could not get you out of it. It was a common saying that women might say ”I’m PWP” (Pregnant Without Permission), as if you had committed a serious crime.
Many factories, therefore, especially munitions, had a massive influx of women workers, resulting in a female-dominated workforce. The Rolls Royce factory at Hillington, near Glasgow, for example, employed over 20,000 women in the production of Spitfire engines. Women were employed in highly-skilled engineering jobs which before the war would have been thought unthinkable.
However, in a large number of factories, the pay for these skilled women was below that of an unskilled man. Up and down the country women were angered by this situation and disputes and strikes broke out.
The measures introduced to deal with labour disputes during the war were draconian. The Emergency Powers Act and Defence Regulations provided the government with all the power it needed to direct and control labour. Strikes were banned under Order 1305 and the 1941 Essential Work (General Provisions) Order, with the threat of imprisonment hanging over anyone who went on strike.
At Hillington, Rolls Royce management attempted to hold back on any equal pay claim, which eventually provoked the women into strike action. These women were attacked as “unpatriotic” by the Daily Mail for daring to strike, but what was more insulting was the attitude of the Communist Party. In a December 1943 article published in the New Propeller (the industrial monthly paper of the Communist Party) these women were called “fifth columnists” and were accused of “endangering the anti-fascist fight”. The CP had the majority control of the shop stewards’ committee and collaborating with management they cobbled together an agreement which only addressed the concerns of 400 women inspectors not the big majority – the 16,000 other women workers.
Sixteen thousand women on strike
Refusing to accept this agreement, 16,000 women (and some men) walked out for over a week. They won a new agreement which specified that every machine in the factory would have a rate for the job, regardless of who was operating the equipment, so effectively the women won their fight. The traditions of women from ‘Red Clydeside’ had been a source of strength for these women, who were having to fight not only their management but the Communist Party-dominated Amalgamated Engineering Union. The District Committee of the AEU had even called for the strikers to be prosecuted under Order 1305
The only support that these women had received was from the Clyde Workers’ Committee and the Militant Workers Federation, small organisations which saw their role as supporting workers in struggle, and they raised finances by collecting in the shipyards of the Clyde.
Equal Pay suffered for a long time with the notion of “Pin Money” – that is the idea that a woman’s work is only to pay for the nice things a woman might like. But for many of the women at Hillington the war had already left them widowed and having to raise a family, so equal pay was a dire necessity.
The war was good for the capitalist who sat in the lap of luxury, while profits rose and dividends increased, due to the overpricing and fraud that these good ‘respectful bosses’ conned out of the war effort. In the meantime, women had to fight for their economic existence, and as the right wing media do, call them “unpatriotic”. It would be good to see some of these newspaper editors do a sixty hour week on a production line!
Ford Women workers
In May 1968 years of frustration came to the boil for women working at the Ford motor plant in Dagenham. At the time, Ford production was vertically integrated, so every piece of the car was manufacture on site, starting with their own blast furnace for the engine castings to the seats.
The dispute was sparked by the unjust gradings of an assessor who had been employed by Ford to introduce a more “rational” pay structure. The female machinists, who stitched the materials required to make Ford’s car and van seats, were classified within the new company pay structure as grade B. They refused to allocate the sewing machinists a higher “C” grade. That meant they were officially “unskilled”, despite having to pass tests to get employment.
This refusal of Ford to recognise the skills of the women is what prompted a highly effective four-week strike in May 1968. Every one of the 187 women went on strike. A myth has grown since that the unions at Ford did not support the women and wanted them to return to work. However, the strike was approved by the shop stewards committee. The fight was taken to other Ford plants and soon 195 women machinists at the Halewood plant in Merseyside also joined the strike.
Ford, with the help of the BBC, started a campaign of divide-and-rule and without any need the company laid off 10,000 production-line workers, because, they said, cars could not be finished without seats. This is despite the fact that Ford had plenty of room to store cars awaiting seats.
Trying to get the men to blame the women
The aim was for the men to blame the women for the layoff and the BBC did its part in that it set up interviews with male Ford workers after prompting them to make hostile remarks about the women strikers. But in general, Ford workers showed a staunch solidarity during the whole of the hard-pressed strike.
The level of trade union concentration at Fords was 100% and by the use of the now-outlawed ‘closed shop’ the unions were able to maintain a strong defensive ability. This was always an annoyance to Ford, who were therefore looking for a route out of Britain to develop plants in less well-organised locations. A flight of capital was on Ford’s agenda and the threat was used against the Labour Government. In 1968, however, it because it would take years to dismantle the plant and reassemble it in a new location.
One other factor lurking in the minds of the Ford bosses and one that called for a quick resolution of the strike was the threat posed by ‘contagion’ from overseas. Across the Channel in France there was a revolutionary mass strike, in which millions of workers were threatening to overthrow the De Gaulle government and bring down French capitalism.
British Capital did not want any spark to set on aflame the British labour movement. The Labour government was called upon to act as an intermediary to resolve the Ford dispute. Labour minister, Barbara Castle, sold a compromise to the women which was not the promised significant pay rise, but rise of 7% in pay to bring the women up to 92% of a Male worker at Fords.
In addition the government promised an inquiry and the findings of that eventually led to the 1970 Equal Pay Act. The Act, unfortunately, still did not see an immediate improvement in pay for women; rather, it led to the segregation of sexes by roles in the workforce. At Fords the issue was of comparative grading and as long as no male machinist were paid differently from the women, the 1970 Equal Pay Act did not apply. It was not until the concept of “equal pay for equal work” was applied that the pay gap could be addressed.
Some 16 years after their high level meeting with Castle, the Dagenham women were still waiting to be recognised as skilled, so out they went again. That time, unlike in 1968, they got exactly what they asked for.
March 7, 2019
