The story of seamstresses' fight for pay parity still resonates 40 years on, Stephen Jewell discovers.
Centred around an industrial dispute about wage parity between the sexes, the upcoming Made in Dagenham doesn't sound like a feel-good film. But if anyone could bring such potentially dry subject matter to life it would be Nigel Cole. The 51-year-old director's second feature Calendar Girls, inspired by the true story of a group of middle-aged Yorkshire women who posed nude to raise money for charity, became a sensation in 2003, grossing almost US$100 ($132) million.
"I listened to the stories of the real women who went on strike 40 years ago and I was immediately struck by the excitement that they felt doing this thing," says Cole.
His film stars Sally Hawkins' (Happy Go Lucky) as unlikely union rep Rita O'Grady, with Jaime Winstone, Geraldine James and Andrea Riseborough as her workmates, and Bob Hoskins as sympathetic shop steward Albert. "I'm not saying that they were like kids but it felt like a day out of school for them, [that] they'd been released," Cole says.
The 187 female sewing machinists at Ford's East London car manufacturing plant downed tools in June 1968 in protest at their classification as "unskilled" workers.
After several difficult weeks, which saw the entire factory shut down, an agreement was eventually reached for the women to be paid 92 per cent of male machinists' wages.
That sped up the introduction of the 1970 Equal Pay Act in Britain and similar laws across the globe. However, since then the machinists' role in fighting sexual discrimination has largely been forgotten. "I grew up in Essex, about five miles north of Dagenham, so those characters at the Ford factory were very familiar to me but I didn't know the story," says Cole
Rita and her fellow machinists' efforts to achieve what they deserve tugs on the heartstrings as they battle not only ruthless company bosses and complacent union officials, but also their own husbands.
"Doing all that emotional stuff is scary because I'm British," admits Cole with a laugh. "We're famous for our stiff upper lip."
According to Cole, little has changed since then with few women landing the top jobs in countries like Britain and New Zealand. "Our film is about a great victory in a great battle in this long war for equality," he says. "The war continues and will continue. We're the transitional generation and we're all trying to find a balance between the old and the new."
Made In Dagenham is released on October 28.
-Herald On Sunday / View
