AMERICAN FACTORY - BACK TO THE FUTURE
By armen pandola
Have you ever worked in a factory? I mean a real factory, not the office version.
My Aunt Esther was a charter member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (founded in 1926) and worked in a sweatshop or clothing factory for sixty years, from when she was 12 years old. Even when the work week changed to five days, she still worked a half a day on Saturday. As a very young boy, I loved going with her on Saturdays - a child can make almost anything into play, even a sweatshop. Later on, in the summer break while in college, I worked in a factory that made metal plates that were put on cars to advertise the dealership where they were purchased.
It is difficult to describe how inhuman most factory work is. For example, in the clothing factory, my Aunt had to put small colored tags on pieces of cloth to identify where they went in the factory. To do this, she operated what was, essentially, a large, powerful stapler that used large metal staples. The trick to making money was to do it as fast as you could without getting your finger caught and a large staple pressed into your fingernail, with the points coming out on the pad of your finger. My aunt could do several thousand a day. In the plate factory, my job was to take a metal basketful of name plates and dip them into a vat of acid to remove excess. It would take 2 or 3 baths for me to get the smell of the acid off of me when I got home.
Today, factories are very different, but still not the most pleasant places to work.
Netflix' American Factory is a documentary (110 minutes) about one factory in Dayton, Ohio that GM closed in 2008. It reopened in 2014 when a chinese company, Fuyao, opened it to make auto glass. The filmmakers, Steven Bognarand Julia Reichert, have been making documentaries for almost 50 years, and this is her fourth Oscar nominated film. It shows. American Factory is well-made and tells its story simply yet powerfully.
Fuyao imported a couple of hundred Chinese workers to supervise the 2000+ Americans it hired and the documentary shows how the two cultures, Chinese and American, fashioned a strange marriage of convenience. The Chinese were contemptuous of Americans. Their judgment was that Americans are lazy, over-confident (from a young age they are told by their families how wonderful they are), egotistical and not easy to manage. The Chinese marvel that the Americans can refuse to work overtime or refuse an order if the task seems dangerous or if it will violate the law (one American says that the Chinese simply pour chemical waste and unused paint down the drain.)
The 'star' of the documentary is Fuyao's billionaire chairman, Cho Tak Wong. He moves around the factory dispensing orders which must be obeyed without question. His sole interest is to make the American factory profitable - why else would he come half-way around the world to open a factory in a strange country? Oddly, we see him in his lavish home in China where he ponders whether he has made the world better and longs for the simple world of his youth. Of course, this altruistic attitude never quite makes it to the factory floor where workers are forced to speed up production no matter what the cost in increased injuries.
America is strange to the Chinese. While the Chinese have an almost child-like devotion to their employer - singing songs about it and starting the work day with a military-style calling of the roll, all very 1984ish - the Americans look on with a wary eye as they are shown videos on large TV screens distributed around the factory of happy children playing in a world made happy by Fuyao.
For the Americans, the reopening of the plant was a blessing, especially to the many who had been unemployed ever since the GM plant closed. The blessing has strings - like making less than one-half what they made before (most now make about $13/hr). We follow a few workers who go from having almost nothing to getting a job that allows them some independence to getting fired or 'terminated' by Fuyao for not working hard enough.
When the United Auto Workers union comes around, the older workers who know the benefits of a union sign up. Fuyao uses every power they have to keep out the union, from firing pro-union workers (later Fuyao paid a fine since this is illegal under US law) to giving impromptu small raises to hiring a company called Labor Relations Institute Inc which is a 'union dissuading company.' LRI was paid more than $750,000 and, I will let you guess who wins that battle - come on, you know.
American Factory is about the transition of the American worker. In the early 20th century most American workers were immigrants, few could speak English. Then, those workers' children and grandchildren came back from WWII to make for the middle-class the greatest era of prosperity the world has ever known. Unions were in the forefront representing 35% of workers in the private sector. Now it's about 6.5% and we have the largest gap between rich and poor since the pre-union Gilded Age. American blue collar workers are back to where they started - the only difference is that, now, they speak better English than the owners.