Made in Dagenham

Movie: Made in Dagenham

Cast:    Sally Hawkins             (Rita O’Grady)

            Bob Hoskins               (Albert Passingham)

            Richard Schiff             (Robert Tooley)

            Miranda Richardson   (Barbara Castle)

            Rosamund Pike           (Lisa Hopkins)

Genre: docudrama

I saw it on: January 2, 2011

Synopsis: This is a dramatization of the events surrounding a 1968 strike at the Dagenham (England) Ford assembly plant.  At the time, this mammoth plant encompassed over 450 acres and employed in excess of 40,000 workers.  Of these 40,000 workers approximately 170 were the women who sewed the seat covers.  Initially, all they wanted was to be reclassified as skilled workers.  Rita O’Grady was drafted by Albert Passingham, a low-level union official who was decidedly sympathetic to the women’s plight, to help present the women’s case to some high ranking union reps.  Rita turns out to be a real tiger and, when she sees the union official are just feeding them a load of bs to get them to shut up, she organizes a strike for the women to get equal pay to the men.  At the time, women were often paid as little as 50% of what men got paid for doing the exact same job.  Eventually the entire plant is shut down when they run out of seat covers.

Ford wanted nothing to do with equal pay for women.  They eventually sent an executive, Robert Tooley, over to get tough.  The battle comes to a climax when the British Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, Barbara Castle, agrees to meet with the women.

My two cents: A great movie.  This strike at Dagenham has enormous repercussions worldwide for women workers.  The matter of fact way that the inequality of pay between the sexes was accepted was astonishing.  I realize that women are still getting the short end of the stick with pay . . . but this movie shows you just how far they have come.

The movie I most remember Sally Hawkins from Poppy is “Happy-Go-Lucky”.  It took me a while to adjust to her Rita character.  She did a great job of looking like a cute little typical housewife, until whatever men she was up against would try to dismiss her and her cause.  The confrontations she had with union management and their reaction to not getting their way are worth the price of admission.  I also enjoyed Miranda Richardson’s character and her head-to-head with the Ford executive, Robert Tooley.  Last, but not least, Rosamund Pike was great as an intelligent well-educated but frustrated wife of a Ford executive who was supposed to just be a house-wife.  When the Ford big-shot, Robert Tooley, makes the mistake of asking her opinion, we learn that she has quite a brain in the pretty head.

Anybody with any interest in the history of the women’s labor movement should see this movie.  To see how Rita O’Grady rises up from just another sewing machine operator to being the leader of the movement is pretty stirring.

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