Industrial decline, rationalization and equal pay: The Bedaux strike at Rover automobile company

In September 1930, Britain's Transport and General Workers' Union negotiated an extraordinary and unprecedented agreement with the Rover company, one of Coventry's major automobile firms, abolishing the gap between women's and men's wage-rates in Rover's trim shops. The agreement was never implemented, and it would be decades before any union won comparable concessions again. None the less, for a brief moment, management and labour had agreed to level all gender-based pay differentials in Rover's trim shop. For the first time in the history of the British engineering industry, women and men were to receive equal pay for equal work. How was it that Rover was prepared to set aside the entire wage and production structure of its industry, a structure built on carefully distinguishing the work and wages of men and women, skilled and unskilled, adult and child? I believe that the answer lies in Rover's effort to survive the Depression by attempting an abrupt switch in its production strategy, from customized small batches to longer, mass production runs. Equal pay was an unexpected and unintended consequence of this attempted switchover, and very probably the reason for Rover's ultimate failure to make the planned transition. Reorganizing one's factory for mass production did not generally lead employers to grant equal pay to their women workers, nor had Rover initially intended any such thing. It was only when the women resisted specific features of the mass production plan, which promised to increase the pace and intensity of work, that Rover agreed to trade equal pay for the women's assent to work under the new system. But the story does not end there, for when Rover negotiated the equal pay agreement, other automobile and engineering firms in the Coventry district rose in sudden, sharp protest. What had been an internal affair at Rover now became a matter of district-wide importance, since granting equal pay would effectively double women's rates at Rover. The presence of a high-wage employer of women threatened to draw off the local supply of cheap female labour, on which Rover's colleagues depended, and so the other firms stepped in and prevented Rover from proceeding. What had begun as an attempt to survive the post-war economic crisis by adopting an innovative production strategy ended in a pitched battle between Rover and its traditionalist colleagues. When the battle was over, Rover had lost and any notion of equal pay was abandoned.