Film

American Factory 2019

Directed by Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert

Documentary
110 min
NR

Cultures collide. Hope survives.

In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.

Documentary factory worker culture clash ohio chinese american blue collar worker manufacturing plant labor rights

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CinemaSerfon TMDB · Sep 20266/10
When a Chinese glass company decides to invest in a former GM motor car factory in the USA, there is local excitement about the prospects of it employing a couple of thousand Ohians and helping to reinvigorate a state that has suffered years of steady industrial decline. Maybe unsurprisingly, though, it doesn't take long for some clashes of culture to take affect between the largely domestic workforce and their Chinese management. The minimum wage is set at $14 per hour and that isn't likely to change at any time soon; the staff aren't quite treated as cattle but their performance targets are pretty much set in stone - and woebetides anyone who falls short. What's obvious is that minimising costs is key - there are even staff employed to sift through the broken glass sorting colour from colour as some glass is more valuable for recycling. Unions are recognised - how could they not be by a company from a nation that has worker's unions at every workplace, but their voices are largely unheard as the bosses' perpetual threat of redundancies and/or closure always limits their potency. This is not a marketplace where the employee has much choice and they and their employers know it. Now
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rsanekon TMDB · Sep 20208/10
You always read about "cultural differences" as being something that must be overcome when dealing with international projects, but that language always felt so abstract to me; if anything, it seemed like more of an excuse as to why things might be delayed rather than a real problem. This doc did a great job of telling the story of what that concept really means in practice. _American Factory_ shows you how much friction is created due to the incongruity in cultural ideas about work ethic, personal freedoms, power, and process. I think that was the highlight of the story for me. For me as an American, there were also feelings of frustration about having a country that doesn't have an answer for these people; their life goes from making $29 working for a US company, to making $12 for a Chinese company. The anti-labor-organizing that we see from Fuyao in the film isn't even unique to this being a China-based company; our home-grown Amazon does a pretty good job of hiring "labor relations" firms to weed out union organizing. I find myself agreeing with one of the speakers at a UAW event captured in the film: we've allowed our country to become one where the rich can exploit the poor,
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