The release of the movie “Made in Dagenham” was eagerly anticipated by many trade unionists only to disappoint. The light hearted interpretation of this major piece of working class history has the same style and approach as adopted for the  “Billy Elliott” interpretation of the Miners Strike or “The Full Monty” to the hardships of unemployment under Thatcher.

A movie can only reflected the historical events but to make such a mess of such a well documented strike is a criminal revision of history worthy of Stalin’s cronies.  Speaking from the experience of the three month Steel Strike, a strike is a time of high tension, not only in the work place, or the picket line but in the families as money becomes short. Ken Loach’s “Leeds United“about a strike garment workers was more realistic than this romp.  It is understood that over the course of time, what is remembered is the comradeship on the picket line, humorous events, and the real hardships will fade with history, but to ignore these in a movie that claims to be a factual reproduction of events is wrong.

The movie did represent aspects of the 1968 working class life well, the solidarity, the time when whole housing estates would supply labour to one employer or the workingmen’s club as hub of trade union and social activity, Some fanciful trips are portrayed however in the movie, the child of ford worker & the child of a managing director going to the same school is beyond the realms of realism.  This device is used by the director to feed the fantasy that all women are subjected to the same repression by all men and remove any class basis for the exploitation of these women workers. This characterisation of all men as oppressors is continued throughout the movie with the depiction of trade union leaders of the period as sexists, which may be they were, but without any reference to the cosy class collaboration of the TUC leaders  it is out of context. The representation of all the male ford workers as against the strike is wrong, as this was official strike endorsed by the ford works committee.

Critics have slatted the industrial banter of the time which aimed sexual comments at a young apprentice as inappropriate for these ladies of Dagenham, but I remember as a young lad of 18 in 1973 walking up the rolling mill at BSC cargo fleet were all the mill operators were female and by the end I was blushing as bright as a beetroot. This banter was the glue that stuck the workforce together in a collective experience and enforced the solidarity.

Unlike the vision of perfect equal pay after the act portrayed by the movie. The reality was something different with employers navigating around the act by segregating workforces or other such manipulations what really happened is that the women of ford inspired other workers to strike for equal pay between 1970 and 1985 over 15 major disputes for equal pay occurred in Britain.

This is a fun romp through the ‘Hollywood’ rose tinted glasses, but is not a true record of events and for a light hearted night out it is as good as anything.

The only other point left is in the credits at the end of the movie the producer and director must have been intimidated by Ford Motor Company, as a caption is displayed stating that the Ford Motor Company has good employee relations today, unfortunately at the sight of such hierocracy I was unable to stop myself from shouting out “Fu*k that, what about the workers at Visteon!”, which got some cheers from the rest of the theatre.

Letter to Socialist Appeal (Issue 190)

Dear Editor,

I, like many others, have been to see the film ‘Made In Dagenham.’ However I see that nearly all of the film was not made in Dagenham itself but in loads of other places.

This does not surprise me. In 1968, Fords employed over 25,000 people at the Dagenham site. At nine in the evening, Dagenham Heathway would be full of people heading off to do the night shift as if it was the middle of the day.

Now the plant is a shell of its former self with just a few thousand  working there. Large parts of the old works have not only been pulled down but the exposed ground has been relandscaped so that you would never know that a building ever stood there.  

The film portrays Ford management as a bunch of money-grabbing bastards - how true that turned out to be!

Tony Hazard (Essex)