Film Review: Made in Dagenham
The giant 120m wind turbine stands over Dagenham Heathway today like an exclamation point. To Ford Motor Co., the U.S. Corporation that erected it six years ago, the turbine is a vigorous declaration of modernity, generating the sustainable energy that drives what it calls a “global center of excellence for diesel engineering.”
These days, however, the 394-ft. (120 m) structure seems to punctuate the cry of pain that was once a busy shopping street in this hardscrabble East London suburb. It was here that Ford Dagenham produced as many as 340,617 cars annually and employed 40,000 people at its peak in the 1960s. Ford’s diesel-engine plant, the only business left on the 475-acre (192 hectare) site, has a workforce of just 4,000; also gone are 60,000 other jobs that depended on the car industry and its employees. TIME magazine wrote a feature article on Britain’s industrial decline on March 29th 2010. Read more here
It’s a depressing tableau, one all too familiar: just like Detroit, this once vibrant centre of auto manufacturing seems stuck in a spiral of persistent decline. But the poverty struck unemployed former workers are holding their heads right now because of a film about them.
I went to the cinema last week-end to see the film, “Made in Dagenham”. It is a factual, feel good movie, based on trade Union records, of another time when the Ford Company was in trouble and how it was confronted by a militant group of female employees that successfully changed the employment practises of women throughout the Western World.
I doubt if it will have a long run on our screens. It has no vampires, no science fiction, no celebrity stars and no fanciful storyline.
But it is a gritty story of some determined women. See it immediately before it leaves our screens and waits until a late-night screening on television. You will not regret seeing it.
This true story is set in the mid-1960’s featuring 187 women who worked as machinists in Ford’s factory sewing seat covers for Cortinas and Zephyrs. The company as part of a Ford world-wide move to improve profitability, down graded the women to being “unskilled” and so lowered their wages. The working conditions are bad in the below ground, hot and sweaty workshop.
In the un-air-conditioned factory the women strip down to their under-wear to do their repetitive work.
Their genial union rep, is like a father figure but his presence makes for some good comedy. Disgusted by their management’s decision to down grade them to “unskilled” workers they decide to go on strike, which was probably the first all-women strike since Aristophanes in 411 BC, recorded how one woman, Lysistrata convinced the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace to end The Peloponnesian War. This strike inflamed a battle between the sexes.
So does the strike by women in Dagenham, in 1968. The male union officials do not take them seriously, the male company management believe they can be forced back to work; the senior Ford management in USA cannot believe production is being halted by a group of lowly paid “unskilled” women, but worse their husbands did not support them, as they were disturbing the natural order of things where men were worth more than women.
But one woman is pushed out of her comfort zone, and becomes the spokesperson, and aided by their Union rep, refuses to give in. She discovers her own inner strength. The male workers are stood down because there are no seats for the production line, but even they cannot turn their wives around. The fast talking Rita O’Grady holds the women together, defies the union and the management, convinces the top brass of the Trade Union Conference to support them, not just for reversing their skill grading, but on the larger issue : equal pay for equal work.
The senior union officials treat them badly and reveal how they are in the Union movement for their own personal ambition as they make their way up the greasy pole of political position. The very people who are there for the sake of their membership betray them.
The American senior Ford Management, including Henry Ford 11nd, push the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson into seeking to restore work place relations or Ford will move their production off shore to preserve their profits.
Wilson had only just promoted the redoubtable Barbara Castle to cabinet as the Minister for Employment. Castle went on to become the most successful female politician the Labor Party ever had.
She knew what gender exploitation had meant in her own rise to power. She secretly supports the strikers, and refuses to bow to Ford’s demands. She helps settle the strike by having the women reclassified as “skilled” workers, with a rise in pay to 92% of the male wage and the promise that she would introduce the Equal Pay act of 1970 which changed Western industrial work practises.
The final scenes as the credits are rolling interviews the actual women who took part in the strike and it is as good as the film.
There have been a series of working class struggles against the management made into films in the last decade. “Brassed Off” was set in the coal mines and the strikes against Margaret Thatcher’s Government. “The Full Monty” followed then by Billy Elliott. But these gritty class struggles all ended with the workers still being defeated while some success was achieved. But in “Made in Dagenham” the workers actually win and the management is done like a dinner. Great stuff!
Rev The Hon Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.