Made in Dagenham

The 2010 film, later a stage play, dramatises the 1968 strike by women machinists at Ford's Dagenham plant. Their action helped bring the Equal Pay Act of 1970 into being. The central character, Rita O'Grady, is fictional.

She holds no formal authority and no institutional backing. She ends up speaking for her colleagues in settings that grow steadily larger and more intimidating, and late in the film a shop steward describes her as a leader who inspires the others.

It inverts the usual sequence. Ordinarily naming precedes action and shapes what will count as action. Here O'Grady performs every function of the hero role — dispatched by colleagues, pursuing a quest against escalating opposition, tested, helped, arriving at a resolution — for most of the film before the word arrives.

The line is almost certainly written for a contemporary audience rather than for 1968, and that is the point. A story set before the vocabulary became dominant needs the word in order to be legible now — which suggests what the drift has cost. Forms of collective authority that carry no title and confer no individual benefit have become harder to see without borrowing an individualist word.

And nobody would call O'Grady a follower; the term would be an insult. Yet leadership language requires followers to make sense, while working life is full of people who are neither. The naming that makes her visible simultaneously converts everyone around her into people she leads, absorbing consent, collectivity and shared ownership into supporting detail.

Naming

1. Whose collective work in your organisation is only visible when attributed to one person?
2. What would you call this if leader and follower were unavailable?
3. Who here is neither a leader nor a follower — and how does your vocabulary handle them?
4. When did the naming happen, and what did it authorise?

Chapter Three: Naming — the chapter carries the evidence and the close reading this page only points at.

Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required · no case facts introduced from outside the manuscript