What was the occupation of the Ford workers who went on strike in 1968, the subject of the film 'Made In Dagenham'?
"halt to all car production. The Dagenham sewing machinists walked out when, as part of a regrading exercise, they were informed that their jobs were graded in Category B (less skilled production jobs), instead of Category C (more skilled production jobs), and that they would be paid 15% less than the full B rate received by men. At the time it was common practice for companies to pay women less than men, irrespective of the skills involved. Following the intervention of Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity in Harold Wilson's government, the strike ended three weeks"
"the main character of Rita O'Grady, who acts as the spokesperson for a group of female workers at Ford's Dagenham plant, who go on strike to fight the inequality that becomes apparent when women workers were to be paid less as they were classed as unskilled. In contrast, their male colleagues were classed as skilled and ultimately received more pay. These actions led to the creation of the Equal Pay Act 1970. It received four British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nominations, including Outstanding British film. In December 2011, it was first revealed that a musical adaption of"
"workers at Ford’s Dagenham plant featured in the popular movie ""Made in Dagenham"". In the same article, Calvi also commented on the discrepancy between the way the East End of London is often represented – 'linked in the popular imagination with gangsters, criminals and prostitutes (or the grim squalor of ""Call the Midwife"")' – and the reality of life for the families of the women she interviewed – 'honest, hard-working families' who 'brought up their children to contribute to the family income'. In a separate article, her co-author Duncan Barrett made a similar point: 'The women we spoke to recalled"
"the Ford Motor Company relocated from Trafford Park in Manchester, to a plant in Dagenham, which was already the location of supplier Briggs Motorway Bodies. A 500-acre (2 km²) riverside site was developed to become Europe's largest car plant, a vast vertically integrated site with its own blast furnaces and power station, importing iron ore and exporting finished vehicles. By the 1950s Ford had taken over Briggs at Dagenham and its other sites at Doncaster, Southampton, Croydon and Romford. At its peak the Dagenham plant had of floor space and employed over 40,000 people, although this number gradually fell during"
"Ford Dagenham Ford Dagenham is a major automotive factory located in Dagenham, London, operated by the Ford of Britain subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. The plant opened in 1931 and has produced 10,980,368 cars and over 37,000,000 engines in its history. It covers around 475 acres and has received over £800 million of capital investment since 2000. Vehicle assembly ceased at the plant in 2002, but it continues as a major production site with capacity to assemble 1.4 million engines a year. In 2008, the plant produced around 1,050,000 engines and was the largest producer of Ford diesel engines globally."
"seat. Dagenham hosts an at times shrinking skilled manual industry such as the Ford Motor Company works, which downscaled production in 2001, leading to replacement distribution and warehousing businesses as well as local regeneration under the Thames Gateway project from 2005 however higher than national unemployment immediately, including following the seat's abolition. See the main successor seat, Dagenham and Rainham for statistics. The largest-polling opposition candidate was Conservative since 1979, with the Liberal Party a greater or equal opponent in elections before that, vying for second place with that party. Unusually, the far-right British National Party was very active in"
"1953. Most of the output of the Dagenham plant during the 1930s consisted of various editions of the Ford 8, a successful model first built at Dagenham in 1932, which probably inspired the even more successful Morris 8, first produced at Cowley in 1935 by the UK market leader of the late 1930s. Wartime production included large numbers of vans and trucks along with Bren gun carriers. The plant produced numerous 'special purpose' engines. Agricultural vehicles were also an important element: at one point, the Fordson represented 95% of UK tractor production. After the Second World War, Ford’s UK operation"
"France. Inspiration for Ford’s Dagenham plant came more directly from Ford’s own Rouge River plant on the edge of Detroit. The first vehicle out of the Dagenham plant was a Ford AA van, produced in October 1931. However, the British economy was in a depressed condition at this time, and the surviving local market for light trucks was dominated by Morris Commercial products. Production at Ford’s Dagenham plant got off to a slow start, but picked up as the local economy recovered, so that by 1937, the plant produced 37,000 vehicles, an annual total that would not be exceeded until"
"all universities, community colleges, and high schools. There will be a cash award. Neither selection criteria nor a judging process have been established. On 22 November 2010, the Canadian Labour International Film Festival partnered with the Equal Pay Coalition, Maple Pictures Corp., CUPE-Ontario, The Machinists Union, the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) and Steelworkers Local 1998 for a special pre-screening of ""Made in Dagenham"", an uplifting film based on the true accounts of a group of extraordinary women who, in 1968, in Dagenham, United Kingdom, found their voice through humour, common sense and courage to fight for equal pay and"
"It was announced in October 2012 that the stamping plant at Dagenham would close in summer 2013 with the loss of 1,000 jobs. Employment at the plant peaked at around 40,000 workers in 1953, and following specialisation to engines only will be about 3,200. Planning of the Dagenham plant began in the early 1920s, a time when lorries were small and road networks little developed. In the UK, bulk supplies were still delivered by water transport, so the Dagenham plant, like the Ford Trafford Park plant which it would replace, needed good water access. Dagenham on the southern estuarial edge"
"Ford engines the world over"". The site has also been the location of the Dagenham wind turbines since 2004. Ford announced in October 2012 that the stamping plant activities at Dagenham would cease in summer 2013. Some additional jobs would be created in the engine-assembly departments at Dagenham, but the GMB Union stated that 1,000 jobs would be lost at Dagenham, saying, ""This is devastating news for the workforce in Southampton and Dagenham. It's also devastating news for UK manufacturing,"" according to the BBC. As of 2016, the stamping plant is under demolition to make way for housing. Ford Dagenham"
"to Briggs' records and controlled pricing of products supplied to Ford and also supply of raw materials to Briggs. Briggs followed Ford to the United Kingdom setting up a plant for their Briggs Motor Bodies Limited in Dagenham when British Ford built there. Ownership was moved to an English subsidiary in 1935 retaining a 60 per cent shareholding. Another plant was set up at Doncaster England after World War II to build bodies for other brands. Briggs Detroit plants (supplying Ford) were the centers of strike action by United Auto Workers in 1933 and 1937 where UAW was successful. Other"
"about the work taking place at Aldenham. In 1962, the opening ten-minute scene of Cliff Richard's musical film ""Summer Holiday"" was filmed at the Aldenham Works, and Cliff's character and friends are all supposed to be mechanics at Aldenham works. Whilst on lunch on a rainy day, they come up with the idea of converting an RT bus into a mobile home and the next 5 minutes shows them at work to the track ""Seven Days to a Holiday"". These scenes were all shot in the works during the summer shutdown, and employees were used as genuine extras. One shot"
"workers to provide further disruption. Nonetheless, workers participating in a slowdown are often punished, sometimes by firing and other times by law. At Ford's plant in Dagenham, UK, during the 1970s, workers introduced a slowdown after Ford management increased the production line speed from 18 to 21 feet per minute. This was a second speed increase, and workers felt that this was unfair. After a go-slow by production line staff, Ford management reduced the line speed back to 18 feet per minute. In July 2011, Qantas engineers introduced an unusual slowdown where right-handed engineers used only their left hands to"
"was gaining a reputation for poor industrial relations, with a particularly lengthy strike leading to a three-month shut-down at the Dagenham plant at the start of the summer of 1971. This savaged availability of the Ford Cortina Mk III during its crucial first year. By the time the Ford Cortina Mk IV was introduced to UK customers, the cars inherited several Ford UK engines but were, in other respects, virtually identical to those branded in left-hand drive European markets as Ford Taunus models. Saarlouis was joined in 1976 by another new European plant in Valencia, Spain, to produce the then"
"its limits: in 1924 Henry Ford sent over a senior representative to identify and purchase a suitable site for a larger plant, and later that year a site was acquired at Dagenham, although Ford UK production continued to be concentrated at Trafford Park until the Dagenham plant became operational in 1931. By this time Perry had been lured back, appointed chairman of the newly formed British Ford Motor Company Limited in 1928. The final car produced at Trafford Park emerged in October 1931: in the same month the first vehicle emerged from the new Dagenham facility. In 1936, under the"
"few days later. The plight of the working-class mill-workers in Oldham - working long hours and living cheek-by-jowl in cramped dwellings - left Fitton’s father with a sense of injustice. He became actively interested in politics and played a prominent role in the Labour movement in the North-West, for which he paid dearly. Employed at the Asa Lees Textile Machine Manufacturers as a foreman in the iron planning shop, he helped to establish the United Machine Workers Union, of which he was Branch Secretary. Identified as the ringleader of a strike, he was immediately sacked. Subsequently, Fitton’s father could only"
"occurring in the United States, but by events within the nation which forced women to think in different ways about their political lives. Two important events, the Dagenham Ford Plant strike by women machinists in 1968 over pay inequality and a campaign launched the same year by women in Hull over local fishermen's safety, led to a desire for women throughout the nation to organize. Student activists in France and the UK were involved in protests over Apartheid and the Vietnam War, radicalizing them, but many women who joined leftist movement felt relegated to the sidelines. Advertising for members to"
"2008 for piloting the Equal Pay Act through parliament. She appears on the 81p denomination. Castle was portrayed by British actress Miranda Richardson in the 2010 film ""Made in Dagenham"", dealing with the 1968 strike at the Ford Dagenham assembly plant. She was later portrayed by stage actress Sophie-Louise Dann in the 2014 West End musical adaptation of the film. Barbara Castle was the recipient of ""The Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in Silver"", a South African award to foreign nationals for friendship with that country. In a statement the South African government recognised Castle's ""outstanding contribution to"
"""Jock"" Carroll who was descended from the Irish O'Carroll clan. Jock may have had a role in the purchase by the Ford Motor Company in 1924 of the land in Essex on which the company built its Dagenham car plant. The plant produced its first vehicle in 1931 and Jock Carroll also built homes for the workers at the plant, using similar mass production building techniques to Ford under the slogan ""a house a day, a street a week"". The business was then taken over by Jock's son John Carroll (born around 1929) and in the late 1970s by his"
"the hands of satisfied owners. The improved Fordson tractor is not yet in production but it is hoped to deliver the first tractors completely manufactured at our Cork works within the next month."" Construction started at Dagenham in 1929, and in October 1931, Britain's and Europe's largest car plant opened producing the Model AA truck and Model A car. This was at the height of the Depression and the Model A was too expensive to tax and run in Britain and very few were sold, only five in the first three months. A smaller car was urgently needed and this"
"support a factory that from the start was planned to incorporate its own steel foundry and coal-fired power station. At the time when the plant was planned, western governments were increasingly responding to economic depression with protectionist policies. This was the context in which Henry Ford’s policy of setting up relatively autonomous car-manufacturing businesses in principal overseas markets can be seen. The drive for self-reliance implicit in including within the Dagenham plant its own steel foundry and power station nevertheless went beyond anything attempted by other European mass-production automakers such as Morris in England, Opel in Germany, or Citroën in"
"Ford Hunger March The Ford Hunger March, sometimes called the Ford Massacre, was a demonstration on March 7, 1932 in the United States by unemployed auto workers in Detroit, Michigan; it took place during the Great Depression. The march started in Detroit and ended in Dearborn, Michigan, in a confrontation in which four workers were shot to death by the Dearborn Police Department and security guards employed by the Ford Motor Company. More than 60 workers were injured, many by gunshot wounds. Three months later, a fifth worker died of his injuries. The march was organized by the Unemployed Councils."
"officially restricted to cases of maternal life, mental health, health, rape, fetal defects, and/or socioeconomic factors. The Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968, led by Rose Boland, Eileen Pullen, Vera Sime, Gwen Davis, and Sheila Douglass, began because women sewing machinists, as part of a regrading exercise, were informed that their jobs were graded in Category B (less skilled production jobs), instead of Category C (more skilled production jobs), and that they would be paid 15% less than the full B rate received by men. At the time, it was common practice for companies to pay women less than men,"
"from finance trainee through various positions in sales and marketing in the UK and Germany; before becoming the Marketing Director for Lincoln Mercury in the United States, returning to become Managing Director and latterly Chairman of the UK company which then encompassed just the Ford brand built at Dagenham. During his chairmanship, he returned the company to profitability from losses of £660Million in 1990, but transferred production of the new Mondeo to Genk, Belgium under Ford's global brand program; while retaining Escort estate production at Halewood and Fiesta production at Dagenham. While chairman of Ford, he held various industry positions,"
"new Ford Fiesta concurrently with Dagenham. The same European strategy was followed by Ford's US rival General Motors, which in the 1970s, also merged the operations of its previously independent Opel and Vauxhall subsidiaries, with similar results. This decision to concurrently manufacture the same models in other European plants reduced the company’s vulnerability to further industrial disruption at Dagenham, and gave Ford a crucial advantage over strike-torn domestic rival British Leyland, which was often unable to fulfill customer orders during the all too frequent times of industrial unrest in the 1970s, and eventually ceded its long-standing UK market leadership to"
"Harry Ferguson sued US Ford for illegal use of his patents asking for compensation of £90 million, settled out of court in 1952. Charles E. Sorensen's autobiography—he was a director of this company—described Ferguson so unfavourably his UK publishers were obliged to scrap all copies and pay costs and Sorensen made a public apology. During the Second World War, the Dagenham plant turned out 360,000 vehicles and a new factory in Trafford Park, Manchester, made 34,000 Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. After World War II, civilian production resumed and Dagenham made 115,000 vehicles in 1946 and factories in Walthamstow in Essex (later"
"with the American-built Probe, and then enjoyed more success with its smaller Puma between 1997 and 2002. In May 2000 Ford announced that passenger car assembly as its Ford Dagenham plant would cease in 2002, ending 90 years of Ford passenger car assembly in the UK. At the same time Ford announced that it would invest US$500 million in the expansion of a diesel engine factory at the site, making Dagenham its largest diesel engine center worldwide and creating about 500 new jobs to offset the 1,900 lost in vehicle assembly. In December 2004 Ford announced a further investment of"
"Dagenham was the Fiesta, itself competing in an increasingly crowded market sector. The lead plant for Fiesta production was in Spain, however. Faced with a cyclical downturn in car demand across Europe, Ford took the decision not to tool the Dagenham plant for the replacement Fiesta due for launch in 2002, which was the year in which the company produced its last Dagenham-built Ford Fiesta. Mindful of its image as a good corporate British citizen, the company stressed that the plant engine-building capacity would be further developed to ""help the UK to become the producer of one in every four"
"London) and Langley in Buckinghamshire (later Berkshire) were acquired. The millionth vehicle made since the Dagenham factory started production in October 1931 rolled from the assembly line on 27 August 1946, a cream Ford 10 saloon. Henry Ford resigned in 1945 in favour of grandson Henry Ford II and died in April 1947. Perry, founder-chairman of Ford Motor Company Limited and each of the Ford Group's European subsidiaries retired in 1948. In 1950 Ford's controlling interests in the European businesses were sold to Ford Dearborn. In 1953, following the death of its Detroit founder, Briggs Motor Bodies, whose parent provided"
"culminating in the creation of Ford of Europe in 1967 in Cork, Ireland. The new entity began to systematically merge the once-separate product lineups from Dagenham and Cologne. Henry Ford & sons followed British designed cars until the formation of Ford of Europe. The 1960s was an era that had several European automakers, including Ford, investing in new assembly plants on greenfield sites. The Dagenham plant was, by 1970, becoming one of the Europe’s older mass-production car plants. In 1970, production of the Ford Escort began at the new Saarlouis in West Germany. By this time, the UK auto industry"
"that I am the only man alive from that original reorganisation when the RAF was formed."" In addition to his military service as a mechanic, Allingham spent the vast majority of his professional life as an engineer. His employers included Thorns Car Body Makers, Vickers General Motors and H.J.M. Car Body Builders. He started his longest stretch of employment in 1934 designing new car bodies for the Ford Motor Company at their Dagenham plant which had opened only a few years previously in 1931. Allingham met Dorothy Cator (1895–1970) in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk in 1918. They married the same year"
"took place on May 2, 1968. The strike, which occurred at the Dodge Main factory, was organized in response to a speedup in the lines. Although the wildcat strike was led by a coalition of workers, including Polish women workers and Black workers, punishment following the action was disproportionately landed upon Black workers. Seven people, including five Blacks, were fired following the action, with all but two, General G. Baker Jr. and Bennie Tate, eventually rehired. Following the strike, nine workers from the plant formed close relationships with the editors of ""The Inner City Voice"", and decided to form the"