More Pin Money

Here's an extract of an interview with Mary Davis - a former Professor of Labour History at London Metropolitan University.

Mary is commenting on social attitudes surrounding the 1968 equal pay strike at the Ford car plan in Essex - made famous more recently by the film 'Made in Dagenham'.

What was the historical background to the1968 strike?

Mary Davis:

"Well there was a very, very long struggle, really from the nineteenth century onwards, for equal pay for women. Women got paid a fraction of the male rate, in all branches of the industry. But also the fact of the matter is that women worked in what could be called segregated areas of employment. They worked in the cleaning, catering, cooking, sewing kind of industries which were always, always paid...but even when they did the same work as men they still got a fraction of the male rate.

The TUC in its wisdom in 1948 adopted the following statement which I'm just going to read because it shows what the attitude was. And of course this was only twenty years before the Ford strike. It says:

"There is little doubt in the minds of the General Council, that's the General Council of the TUC, that the home is one of the most important spheres for a woman worker and that it would be doing a great injury to the life of the nation if women were persuaded or forced to neglect their domestic duties to enter industry, particularly where there are young children to cater for."

So that, I think, summarises the attitude to women workers."

Notice the less than progressive attitude of the unions and the TUC - which is all the more galling when you consider that women workers played a huge role in keeping British industry functioning throughout the Second World War - which finally ended of course in 1945.

Plus ca change - as they say.