American Factory Documentary

[eseum]

Watched the documentary "American Factory" on Netflix last night. It's about a Chinese company opening a glass factory in an abandoned GM plant. It happened in Dayton, Ohio where Fuyao opened an auto glass factory. There are some interesting moments. It is hard to believe that people allowed themselves being filmed saying some of the things they did.

 

There are the obvious conflicts between cultures and work styles. The last point made in the film concerns the loss of jobs to machines. That is of obvious importance to workers every where. The film has connections with the Obama's and I did not watch the 10 minute interview with them that is also on Netflix. I think it makes some pretty important points and does not seem to be overtly political. Most reviews are positive, but there are some stating that this was a complete left leaning political statement. I didn't get that, but then again, I always saw Obama as more of a centrist than a left winger.

[Greg.D.]

We are about 45 minutes in, maybe more. Stopped at the point where the UAW is trying to get involved.

 

Just want to point out that a Chinese factory will use at least double the number of workers (because wages are so low) and, as the one woman said: she works 12 hours/day 6 days a week. We know what the American work week is like. So, since Chairman Cao knew that going in, I'll be interested to see how Fuyao responds to the Ohio challenges. Also: you never see a worker in a photo of a Chinese factory older than 40. Age discrimination is both legal and widely practiced in China.

 

Otherwise, yeh: it's pretty obvious why China's eating our lunch.

 

Hope to finish it soon.

[amberjack1234]

....

Edited August 26, 2019 by amberjack1234 (see edit history)

[Allon]

I saw it a few days ago. And read the criticisms. It's amazing how the stimulus generalization starts when anything that approaches something a capitalist regards as poison. They go from the Some (or logically, One) to the All in a heartbeat. I won't elaborate.

 

The film was supported by the Obama's production company, Higher Ground. The film makers said they were being as objective as possible and continued to follow (not lead) the story when the UAW forced a failed union vote. I note that the Chairman fought tooth and nail to prevent the vote from happening, a man who comes from a country whose founding father was an avowed Marxist. I am sure some people got fired (illegally) for supporting unions. It was intimated in the film. I do not feel it went one way or the other. It just presented what happened, as it happened.

 

My wife watched with me. She mentioned when they got to the part about the difficulties of the Chinese workers there, how difficult it is to live in America. She identified with them. And she noted the Chinese are accustomed to 12 hours 7 days a week. But she had no answer when I noted how many festivals (translation: time off) China has compared to 7 legal days per year in many shops here, 10 federal holidays. I had to get out a calendar and show her. And what about life expectancy? China is lower (76 but gaining on the US at 79) than the worldwide average. Expectancy is also a factored by the health care system and social conditions too. But working conditions are a major factor.

 

There is lots of room for discussion in that film. Of course, the first question I had was: who the hell lives in Dayton anyway? When I was there, hardly a soul walked the street. And that is when the car factories and a major computer manufacturer were there. (Reminds me of the John Denver song about Dayton's neighbor to the north, Toledo:

 

Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio is like being nowhere at all....

 

Let's let the sleeping dogs lie

And here's to the dogs of Toledo, Ohio

Ladies, we bid you goodbye!

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN

https://www.federalpay.org/holidays

https://chinapower.csis.org/life-expectancy/

http://www.songlyrics.com/john-denver/saturday-night-in-toledo-ohio-remastered-live-lyrics/

[dnoblett]

Started watching with the wife last night we enjoy and can understand the culture clash.

 

https://www.netflix.com/title/81090071?s=i&trkid=13747225

[amberjack1234]

I had pretty much the same thing to say but more then deleted it. I didn't want to start any trouble.

[eseum]

Hey, don't dis Dayton, it's a nice Midwest town. Sure it's quiet and a little quaint but it's never claimed to be a big city, or wanted to be one. Okay, so I admit I grew up in Ohio.

 

I visited Dayton a few times and enjoyed it. They once laid claim to the fastest half marathon. I participated in it one year. Some of the worst weather I ever ran in. Rain and high winds so bad it made the rain feel like needles when it hit. The Welshman, Steve Jones was there and won the race with a pretty good time despite the weather. He looked like a machine out there.

 

I thought it was interesting toward the end of the movie when the chairman was reminiscing about his early life compared to now. I could only shake my head when he said that he lived to work. He didn't really seem to be a happy man. I have only ever worked to live and so that I could enjoy living, especially in retirement.

[Greg.D.]

Finished the documentary (though we watched it with mandarin subtitles to accommodate MIL so, I missed some things).

 

Nothing to see here: company wants to extract more from workers who want to work less for more money.

 

A union would have been inappropriate in this factory: there isn't much money to be made in glass except by the shippers. The threat of a union did get them $2/hour raise, though, and the factory was still profitable.

[Randy W]

from NPR

 

Why We Should All Watch 'American Factory'

 

And so American Factory is only nominally a film about America. The part that is astonishing about American Factory is seeing everything about the United States through the eyes of Chinese factory workers and managers arriving to reopen and restaff a plant in the rust belt. American Factory is the view we never get. Americans know how they feel about competing with China. But we don't know how China feels about working with America.

Just minutes in, two workers from China, a couple, stand on a ledge overlooking Dayton. They marvel at the houses, which seem like antique wonders to them. They think it's beautiful. And on second watching, I took a moment to look at the view, too, and, yeah, Dayton may be an opportunity zone, but it's underrated.

. . .

Any jealousy over freedom of expression quickly gives way to a general disappointment in the Americans as workers. The chairman comes to visit, and a manager explains what the Americans are like as workers. "They're pretty slow," he explains. "They have fat fingers. We keep training them over and over." Americans also like to take off weekends.

The chairman, Cho Tak Wong, is a forbidding presence, alternating between lofty language about character and serious complaints about unions. "The motherland is like a mother," he says in one address to the Chinese staff. "This is eternal." Noting that they aren't there for the money but to represent their country, he tells them: "It's down to every one of you here." In the next scene, he's on a plane, trying to figure out how to deal with labor. "I can't manage them," he complains. "When we try to manage them, they threaten to get help from the union."

There is so much more to this movie. There's a visit to headquarters in China, which starts with the executive staff singing the company anthem — "Noble sentiments are transparent/For the sake of transparency" — and it gets more unfamiliar from there. The directors take their loving time with process, too. This is a movie for activists but also for people who think it's interesting to see how glass goes from hot sand to polished windows, and it spends a few moments on the challenges and pleasures of forklift driving. It's not exactly an uplifting film, but it's one of the most interesting ones to come along in a while.

 

 

[Randy W]

I'm not sure that anyone will have any interest in reading more about the documentary, but this article is from a Chinese perspective.

 

So here you are, if you're interested.

 

From the Sixth Tone

 

http://image5.sixthtone.com/image/5/20/70.png

Zhang Ling Assistant Professor

"Zhang Ling is an assistant professor of cinema studies at Purchase College, State University of New York"

 

An ‘American Factory’ in the Era of Global Capitalism

What a new documentary can — and can’t — tell us about the challenges faced by the workers of the world.

 

http://image5.sixthtone.com/image/5/20/131.jpg

A screenshot showing a relief sculpture of Fuyao CEO Cao Dewang. From Douban. Cao is depicted holding an entrepreneurship award and the Chinese flag.

 

Despite not yet having a Chinese distributor, hashtags related to the film on Twitter-equivalent Weibo already have more than 13 million views combined, and it has an average score of 8.4 on the country’s most popular review site.

 

. . .

 

American Factory” offers a window into the declining status of the American worker. One new Fuyao employee tells the filmmakers she used to earn $29 an hour at the GM plant; she makes $13 an hour at Fuyao. Across the Rust Belt, race- and class-based stratification and segregation, poor educational opportunities, and declining social mobility have left the American working class feeling trapped. Yet, because their wages are still higher than those of their counterparts in third world countries, and because they enjoy hard-won labor protections, corporations continue to move manufacturing jobs offshore.

Abandoned by their companies and the government, residents of the Rust Belt may have thrown the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. In 2012, Democrat Barack Obama won Ohio by almost 4 percentage points; in 2016, Hillary Clinton, another Democrat, lost it by 8. Many factory workers saw Clinton as a representative of coastal elites who disdained manufacturing as an engine of economic growth.

Instead, they were seduced by Trump — himself a coastal real estate mogul — and his call to “Make America Great Again.” Ironically, Liu Daochuan, Cao’s hand-picked choice to replace the “incompetent” American head of Fuyao’s American operations, seizes on Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan to encourage the plant’s workers to be more productive.

. . .

Yet, the core problem here is not American workers feeling disrespected because the Chinese do not compliment them enough. Neoliberal elites might prefer to keep attention focused on issues of race or international conflict — whether in the form of Trump’s repeated assertions that the Chinese are stealing American jobs, or Fuyao CEO Cao’s belief that his American staff was dissatisfied because of their antipathy toward the Chinese. But the collision of culture and race cannot be allowed to obscure class interests that extend beyond national borders.

The tragedy of “American Factory” comes from watching workers at the bottom of the social hierarchy pitted against one another on the brutal battleground of global capitalism. In the film, American workers reminisce about the days of high wages and good benefits that now seem gone forever. It is important to remember, however, that Chinese workers have never experienced these luxuries, not simply because capitalism arrived late to China, but also because, in the hierarchy of the global market economy, third world workers remain stuck on the lowest rung.

 

 

[Greg.D.]

Wow, that was a great essay. A great accompaniment to the documentary.

[amberjack1234]

When I worked for the federal government we management personnel had to have 40-80 hours of personnel management classes each year. We had a guy named Richard Horwell that was a Ph.D. and the owner of his own company. He formerly worked for a very large company that was in the same line of work in New York City. He quit them and moved to the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina and bought his own mountain to build his home on. In his class, he thought that money was not a motivator of employees that the motivator was Parise to the employee.

 

Another note was for we Americans" That the war in Vietnam was a cultural changer for America. The post-war worker had to be explained why he had to do something and not just go and do a job that you now had to explain to them why it had to be done and how. Unlike in the pre-war era of employees. I thought about that a lot after the class and I had both workers at the time and watched and compared them and he was right. The post-Vietnam war workers were much more difficult and time-consuming to supervise. I could tell an older guy to go and do a job and he would jump up and do it immediately with no explanation or instructions and the younger guys had to sit there and have the why and how explained to them. It was easy to see back then when I had a 50-50% mix but today you only have probably less than a 10-90% mix. So it is probably harder to see. The post-Vietnam workers are still here and are still a large portion of the workforce now. Then the Millennials, another story altogether.

 

I retired in 1998 so I don't know how today's workers compare.