UK : Ford sewing machinists' strike in 1968 was not for equal pay
Yet again we get, from Harriet Harman this time, the myth that the Ford sewing machinists went on strike in 1968 for “equal pay” (Barbara Castle’s memoir
In fact, as my recent book Notoriously Militant demonstrates, the strike was sparked by the unjust grading decision of an assessor employed by the company to introduce a more “rational” pay structure. Fearing possible rebellion by the semi-skilled workers who had been allocated a comparatively low “B” grade, the company refused to allocate the sewing machinists a “C”. This, rather than any idealistic notions of social justice as suggested by the largely middle-class “equal pay” demand, was what prompted their highly effective four-week strike in, of all months, May 1968. In order to get the sewing machinists back to work, Castle promised both a significant pay rise and a government inquiry into the dispute, the findings of which eventually led to the 1970 Equal Pay Act.
In other words, the roots of what passes for equal pay in this society lie not in any feminist movement for “justice” but in a highly pragmatic move by a skilful minister to sabotage an action that, at the time, threatened the entire economy – not to mention coinciding with quasi-revolutionary strike action in France. No wonder Castle recalls in her diaries that “everyone was jubilant about the settlement”. Everyone, perhaps, other than the sewing machinists and the hard-pressed Ford workers in general whose staunch solidarity was based on the hope of a boost for their own unimpressive increase.
It is about time that middle-class politicians stopped rewriting history according to their own (mis)conceptions and started taking a good look at what actually happens out there in the real world.
Sheila Cohen
London
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