Netflix
For Midwesterners, much of the scenery in American Factory will be hauntingly familiar: vast stretches of plains, rundown houses, big skies and snow-covered buildings. The center of this riveting documentary, available for streaming on Netflix, is a factory in Dayton, Ohio. Once the driving force of a bustling company town, Dayton’s GM plant shut down in 2008, leaving 2,400 people jobless. Documentarians Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar were there, filming The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant.
Their fascinating followup, American Factory, opens with a pink sky panorama and gorgeous shots of industrial artistry. It cuts to a preacher asking people to sit down as he delivers the news of the plant closing. We see closeups of tears and hugs, and can feel the despair setting in.
Hope arrives in 2010 when a Chinese company, Fuyao Group, buys the factory and retools it into an auto glass production facility. The company creates 2,000 non-union jobs, hiring many former United Automobile Workers (UAW) members and bringing in several hundred workers from China to help train them in the ways of Fuyao. It’s an education, a cultural exchange, and ultimately a conflict as Dayton’s worker-centered culture crashes against the hyper-capitalist Chinese management system.
In trainings, Chinese managers tell visiting workers to loosen up: “You are free; you can even joke about the president.” And “Americans’ cars are big and huge, very comfortable.”
The corporation’s billionaire founder and CEO, Chairman Cao Dewang, arrives, saying “I love Ohio,” attempting stiffly to connect with people working on the floor. But he comes off as out of touch and capricious, declaring that fire alarms and doors must be moved because he says so.
The film spends time with workers who are genuinely torn, sharing grief about long-term unemployment and stories of foreclosure and loss. Bobby, a furnace loader, explains he is grateful to have a job, but he made $29 an hour at GM; at Fuyao he makes less than $13.
The Chinese workers, too, are finding it hard to integrate. Some of their American counterparts reach out to them, inviting them to barbecues and to experience guns and Harley-Davidsons. But they often eat and socialize separately, living in stark, crowded homes. They miss their families back home and are mystified by the Americans’ attitudes.
At the opening ceremony for the facility, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown drops a bomb, declaring his support for a UAW organizing effort at the factory. “Who the fuck does he think he is?” says a Fuyao exec, and the battle lines are drawn, as the second half of this gripping tale unfolds. “If a union comes in, I’m shutting down,” Cao says sometime later, and as the months drag on we see he is frustrated with the lack of profitability of his $500 million investment, blaming the U.S. workers.
American Factory is the finest kind of documentary, one that is able to focus on people’s individual lives and struggles while also illuminating global issues. I appreciate the filmmakers’ efforts to avoid demonizing or exoticizing the Chinese workers. But it is hard to imagine two workplace cultures more diametrically opposed. When the American execs take a trip to the Fuyao facility in China, the film approaches surrealism. Men and women in suits sit at a conference table, singing “All the blessings for Fuyao are transparent.” The Americans, wearing polo shirts and baseball caps, sit politely and then are brought around to witness military-style drills where the workers clap and chant “Sorry! Please! Thank you!”
They learn that people work 12-hour shifts and only have one or two days off per month. Many work far from their homes and can only see their families a couple of times a year. And workplace safety rules seem nonexistent. Workers sort giant piles of broken glass without glasses or protective gloves. And then it gets even wilder: At a special evening celebration, plant workers don sequined dresses and suits and dance, singing about “intelligent and lean manufacturing.”
Back home, one of the Fuyao workers has a Norma Rae moment as the union drive heats up; he carries a “Union Yes” sign aloft as his co-workers cheer and security escorts him out. Union sympathizers are fired, and the company escalates the anti-union campaign by paying $1 million to the Labor Relations Institute to run mandatory meetings where they distribute anti-union messages.
We’ve seen this before. But the way the filmmakers show it, up close, with in-depth interviews with people from both camps, makes it clear that the battle for the future of the country is taking place in situations like this.
I won’t spoil the ending of American Factory. But there’s a reason why the doc is the first one to be released by Michelle and Barack Obama’s new production company, Higher Ground.
Lucky for us, UW Cinematheque is hosting an entire series of Julia Reichert documentaries this fall/winter. She is a towering figure in the field, with a body of work spanning the past five decades. See her in person on Nov. 16 when Cinematheque screens Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists.
