On 15 February 2019, John Partington (TSSA) of the Reading Trades Unions Council joined a discussion of the gender pay gap at Oxford Playhouse. The event, 'Second at the Table', was organised by 472 Productions and featured a panel with Anneliese Dodds, Labour MP for Oxford East, and Stephen Woolley, producer of the film, 'Made in Dagenham' (2010). Reading citizens will remember Anneliese as Reading East's unsuccessful Labour candidate in 2010 as well as the Southeast Region MEP from 2014 to 2017. The event preceded the performance of the stage musical of 'Made in Dagenham' at the same theatre.
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| Anneliese Dodds MP (centre) and Stephen Woolley (right) |
Following the panelists' introductions, the compere (an Oxford University academic) began by asking Stephen if he felt entertainment could usefully engage people in politics. He replied that he thought it could, especially by raising consciousness of persons and events lost in the mists of time. Stephen explained that he grew up in North London in the 1960s, not many miles away from Dagenham, and yet he knew nothing at the time about the women sewing machinists' strike at the Ford plant in 1968 which led to the Equal Pay Act of 1970. With the exception of fringe newspapers, the media did not cover it. So when he learnt of the events at Ford's many years later, he knew the film had to be made. Getting the story out there has educated and energised new generations of workers. He did add, though, that the Donald Trump phenomenon presents a caveat to the power of the media. Trump has succeeded in the teeth of mass media opposition and open war with certain media outlets, demonstrating the neutered power of televisual and print media in a world of rapidly changing technology.
Anneliese suggested that the political activism of youth in recent years has brought a new excitement to politics. Women are engaging in the revived 'Reclaim the Night' movement and other shows of defiance towards those who would try to limit women's spaces, using creativity and activism at the grassroots and demonstrating another form of 'creative art' being used to politicise communities.
In terms of the gender pay gap, Anneliese noted the influence of automation in drawing women into traditionally male workplaces - where the culture of 'men's work' existed previously, women have asserted their right to partake. However, she also cited the fact that, where women enter industries in numbers for the first time, there is a trend of real-terms wage reductions. Women are still deemed as 'worth less' than men - whether that is because they take career breaks for childbearing or their promotion and performance reviewing suffers unconscious discrimination or for other reasons, the issue is complex.
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| John Partington (TSSA & RTUC) with Anneliese Dodds MP |
While suggesting that flexible work patterns might assist women in fitting work around other responsibilities, Anneliese cautioned that the role of women as primary carers and often filling part-time roles left them vulnerable to continuing their dual responsibilities as mothers and workers without the same balance being expected of men. In answer to a question from the floor, she also worried about the insecurity flexibility brings with zero-hour contracts and the option often pursued of working several jobs 'flexibly' without the employment entitlements of a full-time employee such as overtime pay, a decent pension, special leave, etc.
John spoke about the notion of the 'on call' employee (formally and informally) and the cultural impact of 24/7 'availability'. He contrasted two types:
1) The senior manager in the railway industry, usually male, whose phone and emails are always on and who 'requires' to be available at all times. He's less likely to be available to perform the parenting/caring duties which his partner undertakes due to the importance of being 'available on call' at all times - even while he is not contracted for on-call duties. His substantial salary compensates for such availability - even when not actually called upon.
2) Contrast the NHS nurse, paid an insubstantial sum for working long and strenuous shifts, who takes on-call shifts - sometimes to bolster her (sometimes his) wages but also out of a commitment to service delivery. The financial incentive comes second to the commitment to patient care.
Wrapped up in these examples are questions of work/life balance, fair reward for services rendered and appropriate staffing levels - but also a gendered culture of prestige versus commitment in workplaces. While the other issues can be tackled mechanistically - the cultural barriers to equal opportunities and equal treatment at work have barely changed in the fifty years since the Dagenham strike. Trade unions are grappling with the issue - more so now that more than half of trade unionists are women - but the solution is complex.
