Eileen Braddock obituary

Eileen Braddock, who has died aged 88, was a machinist at the Faircloth hosiery works in Leicester when, in March 1976, she climbed on to a loading bay outside the factory gates and told 600 women that they were going home until the firm paid them the same rate as the men on the floor above. The strike that followed lasted 17 weeks, drew national attention, ended in a settlement that gave the women 92% of the male rate and a timetable for the rest, and turned Braddock, then 38, into one of the most recognisable trade unionists of the decade.

She was born in 1938 in Belgrave, the Leicester district that has since become the heart of the city’s Gujarati community and was then a street of terraced houses occupied by hosiery workers. Her mother was a seamer at Corah’s, the largest hosiery firm in the city, and her father a bus conductor and a union man; she said later that she had grown up “at the branch meeting”. She left school at 15 for the mills, married a fellow machinist, Len Braddock, at 19, and had two children by 23, returning to work after each.

The 1976 strike was not her first. She had been a shop steward since 1962 and had led two short stoppages over piece rates, but the Faircloth dispute was of a different order. The Equal Pay Act had come into force at the end of 1975 and Braddock, with a copy of it in her overall pocket, argued that the firm’s grading system, which put the women on a rate 30% below the men for work that she said was “the same, only faster”, was unlawful. The firm disagreed. The women walked out, the union backed them after a fortnight and the picket line on Frog Island became a fixture of the national news, with Braddock, in a headscarf and a cardigan, as its unhurried spokeswoman.

The settlement in July 1976 was imperfect and she said so, but it set a pattern that was followed in hosiery firms across the east Midlands over the next five years. She was elected a full-time district officer of the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers in 1978 and, when it merged into the Transport and General Workers’ Union, moved across. In 1989 she became the TGWU’s regional secretary for the East Midlands, the first woman to hold such a post in the union’s history, and ran a region of 120,000 members for nine years through the collapse of the textile industry that had made her.

That collapse was the grief of her later career. Between 1990 and 2005 the Leicester hosiery and knitwear trade lost around 25,000 jobs as production moved abroad, and Braddock spent much of her last decade in office negotiating redundancy terms for factories she had once organised. She was pragmatic about it and furious in equal measure. “We won equal pay,” she said in a 1998 interview, “and then they closed the factory. I don’t regret the first thing. I will never forgive the second.”

She retired in 1998, was appointed OBE in 2000, which she accepted “on behalf of the Faircloth women”, and served for 12 years as a Labour councillor in Leicester, where she chaired the housing committee and was known for turning up at the council’s repairs depot unannounced. She remained a member of the union, by then Unite, until her death, and attended the branch’s Christmas social last year. Her husband died in 2009. She is survived by her children, Carol and Peter, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Eileen Mary Braddock, trade unionist, born 2 February 1938; died 10 October 2026