What do we want? Equal Pay! When do we want it? Now!

Winning equal pay then became an extremely cumbersome process, with unions having to prove the case with detailed studies and submissions. Not surprisingly in the end only 18 percent of women got formal equal pay. "The result for the women in the meat industry," Zelda noted, "meant that only 12 percent of women would receive equal pay." Only 120 women out of 2,000 won equal rates!

Well no-one was going to let it go at that. Zelda continues the story. Some time later she went to a meeting of the Victorian Employed Women's Organizations' Council, VEWOC. It was made up of the trade unions with female members. Only two women turned up for the meeting, Zelda and Diane Sonnenberg from the Insurance Staff Federation. Zelda recalls, "We started talking and she said that maybe we needed to chain ourselves up like the Suffragettes did. We laughed, but I thought about it and said I was prepared to do it."

So Zelda chained herself to the Government offices' doors. Some women contacted her afterwards and a number of them decided to do the same again in October 1969, when there was a teachers' strike. This time they went to the Arbitration Commission.

Yvonne Smith: 'We stood outside calling out slogans which could be heard inside the (Arbitration) Court and waving banners such as: "Unequal Pay is Sex Discrimination" and "Make 1969 Equal Pay Year."

Equal pay was granted, but as the current fight by the Australian Services Union shows, women are still fighting to win it.

However in 1969 one union decided to implement the decision its way. Taking industrial action at both the industry and workplace level delivered equal pay to 90 percent of women members of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (now the AMWU) by the start of 1972.

As well, more women joined the union and more became shop stewards. The union commented that "a feature of the activity was the readiness of the women concerned to take industrial action to support their demand."

Compare this with the banking and insurance industry, which comprised of around 50 percent women and which followed, to the letter, the 1969 decision process, just going to the courts and taking no industrial action. They won nothing.

In the end what mattered was not the number of women in the industry, but the industrial strength and militancy of the union (and also their politics, in a more general sense).

In the meantime, Women's Liberation groups had sprung up around Australia, Zelda being one of the founders in Melbourne. It had a number of working class demands, including that for full economic equality – pay, right to work, job opportunities, child care, maternity leave, and the like.

With increasing numbers of women in the workplace, wage inequality was an obvious target for the Movement's attention. Activists joined the picket lines of striking Sportsgirl machinists, and supported Melbourne tram conductresses trying to get jobs as drivers. The movement's orientation to women as workers affected the unions. A Working Women's Group was set up in the middle of 1972.

By 1972, there was an increased push for 'real' equal pay and the unions again took the case to the Arbitration Commission. While agreeing to widen equal pay to "equal pay for work of equal value" – 'similar content or tasks' rather than 'identical' work, there was still no basic equal pay rate. More crucially employers (over 60 percent) rushed to reclassify women's jobs onto a different and lower scale to men in similar work. So unions had to fight for equal pay all over again.