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Analysis and review of netflix’s ‘american factory’, by susan kikuchi | february 10, 2020.

American Factory a complex tale of class struggle on shifting global terrain; reducing the story to culture clash overlooks the real threat of global corporatism

Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s recent film American Factory is a sensitive, compelling look inside Fuyao Glass America, a Chinese automotive glass manufacturer that took over a former General Motors plant in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. The film follows workers and management through the plant’s opening days and into a failed union drive.

Multiple reviewers attribute the central conflict to the company’s Chinese roots, an “East vs. West conflict.” But rather than simply “cultural differences” or “incompatibility,” American Factory depicts the shifting ground of globalization, and workers’ attempts to find stability therein – across national, cultural, and racial lines.

Rolling Stone calls it “a testament to the immutable characters of two national identities.” A review on rogerebert.com says “the trouble is that there are innate differences between the Chinese and American attitudes toward work that simply cannot be overlooked.”

Reading these reviews feels troublingly familiar as an Asian American. They default to lazy cultural essentialism – that is, the Chinese treat their workers bad because they’re Chinese – rather than because of the realities of global capitalism. Such statements imply that the “American” position is the worker-friendly one, as though America weren’t one of the least worker friendly nations in the so-called developed world. As though the expectations of higher labor standards, held by Americans in the movie, aren’t shaped by years of uphill battles for union contracts; as though these U.S. autoworkers’ predecessors didn’t face death threats from their American employers a scant few decades prior.

Is it fair to call it a “cultural difference” when accounting for differences in labor standards between countries, shaped by vastly different histories? Is it an “East vs. West” divide when workers on both sides of the Pacific are going on strike for improved conditions? And, perhaps most crucially, when U.S. and Chinese corporations both operate overseas in a multinational race to the bottom?

To be sure, interpersonal tensions along cultural and national lines play out at Fuyao Glass America. A white American worker complains about feeling like she is “in China” when she walks into work; another, also white, says that “this is America, we don’t need Chinese children singing and praying” on flatscreen TVs in the break room. Fuyao management gives a series of grossly generic, sometimes cringe-worthy talks to its Chinese workers about American culture; president Jeff Liu at one point tells Chinese workers of their American counterparts, “We need to use our wisdom to guide and help them. Because we’re better than them.”

But the context for these tensions is that Fuyao is a multinational corporation operating an overseas plant and trying to put down a union effort. It appears to be the site of multiple safety violations and pays its employees significantly lower wages than its predecessor. Workers at General Motors had a union contract and carry expectations shaped by that experience. One worker, Shawnea, reveals that she made over $29/hour at General Motors with a UAW contract; at Fuyao, she makes $12.68. The safety supervisor, Robert, notes with concern that people are being exposed to dangerous levels of heat inside the factory. Bobby, a veteran autoworker, has his first workplace injury at Fuyao.

That’s a ubiquitous story about work in 21 st century America. It calls to mind the local example of Lakeville Motor Express , a Minnesota trucking company that shut down overnight and opened up shop under a different name and no union contract. And without a union, workers face increased risk of injury, even death . While General Motors and Fuyao are separate corporations, Fuyao is part of GM’s supply chain. In other words, GM closed their plant and one of their parts suppliers moved in, with no union contract.

Inside Fuyao Glass America, as employees begin to organize and management pushes back, it’s sometimes unclear what is national and what is class conflict. The talks by Fuyao management could be seen as simplistic outsider attempts to educate their workers about “American culture,” but in the context of a union drive, become more insidious management techniques to divide the Chinese nationals from their American counterparts and thereby dissuade them from joining the union.

Reichert and Bognar meld sound bites of worker complaints about “the Chinese,” with complaints about workplace safety, pay, and basic respect. It’s not clear if the workers mean “all Chinese,” or “management.” We also get to hear considerably less from rank-and-file Chinese workers than their American counterparts and from Fuyao management. Though we spend a lot of time with Wong, a furnace engineer, his struggles coming to the US, and his heartwarming relationship with Rob, an American coworker, we don’t hear a lot of Wong’s take on workplace politics. In the filmmakers’ defense, it’s hard to know whether this is due to oversight on their part or to the kind of pressures Chinese workers in the US might be under. We don’t hear anything about their visas, if they hope to stay in the US, or how their immigration status might impact their ability to be vocal about certain issues.

Whatever the reason might be, we don’t get to find out whether many Chinese workers buy in to Fuyao management’s simplistic generalizations about Americans; we also don’t know how a lot of them feel about the union organizing drive, other than a few shots of Chinese workers with anti-union stickers. Considering that in recent years China has seen a huge increase in strikes it would be interesting to know what sentiment is like inside Fuyao’s plant there, but we only see what the company shows a visiting delegation from the US, plus a few blurbs from workers about conditions. (Which are, unsurprisingly, not good). The visit includes shots of the Fuyao worker’s union/communist headquarters, and a brief interview of its president – the chairman’s brother-in-law. The obvious problem of company unionism in China leaves unanswered questions about how this might shape workers’ thoughts about unionization in the US.

While Reichert and Bognar secured impressive access to every level of Fuyao’s operation, it’s difficult to blame the filmmakers for some of the movie’s unanswered questions. If nothing else, they do a very adequate job showing the conditions that might prevent some actors from saying more.

Rather than being a “fascinating tragicomedy about the incompatibility of American and Chinese industries” ( Indiewire ) the film and the facts suggest that the interests of global capital are all too aligned. They’re just not working for working class people – anywhere.

Fuyao’s management techniques come straight out of the anti-union playbook used by American companies; they hire LRI, an American professional union-busting firm. Fuyao Glass America has been making a profit since 2018, and supplies glass for the same General Motors who closed up shop and left all those folks jobless in 2008. General Motors is alive and well, operating plants in 37 countries and paying workers much lower wages than they would have to at home. In fact, General Motors now employs more workers in China that it does UAW members in the US.

Chalking the harms of global capitalism up to cultural differences does a disservice to the workers who are fighting for dignity on both sides of the Pacific. Bognar and Reichert leave us with a few of those workers: Rob and Wong, the furnace engineers whose unlikely friendship is one of the scarce uplifting points in the movie; Timi, a union activist, will “never give up on the American dream.” In a system that values them only as labor, these workers retain their humanity and their complexity. It’s the only thing that sets them aside from their robot competitors, which the filmmakers invoke in the movie’s sobering final scenes.

The ability to set differences aside and support each other may be the only solution to increased globalization and automation, in which a handful of corporations laugh all the way to the bank while the rest of us fight over a shrinking pool of jobs.

The Humans Behind Labor Politics: A Review of American Factory

The Good, the Bad and the City is a film review series that examines how cinema expands our understanding of city identity and how reemerging cityscapes in the post-industrial age have influenced cinema. The opinions expressed in this series are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect any official organizational stance. Cover graphic by Jason Mecchi for Midstory.

In Moraine, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, a former GM plant was bought by Chinese automobile glass manufacturer Fuyao in 2014, a decision that seems routine in an increasingly globalized economic environment. But for the American and Chinese workers employed by Fuyao (many of whom had worked at the GM plant), the shift proved to be quite an adjustment—for some, even life-changing. Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary film American Factory ( 美国工厂) (2019) explores the collision of these two work cultures as both a case study of Fuyao and an examination of wider cultural differences and changing attitudes about work in light of ever-increasing globalization.

With its fly-on-the-wall style, American Factory delves deep into the lives of the American workers in Moraine, the American managers handling changes under new management and the Chinese managers struggling to transition to an American lifestyle and work culture. The film, which also won an Academy Award in 2020 for Best Documentary Feature, touches on issues such as work safety, unionization and workers’ rights, all the while emphasizing the culture shock and, indeed, culture clash brought about by the acquisition.

Perhaps most importantly, Bognar and Reichert also tell a story of what the future of work will look like: a world of globalization, optimization and automation. Where does the worker fit into this? There are no easy answers, but this exploration of Fuyao at least affords us the opportunity to see into this metamorphosis at all levels—individual, union, corporate and global. Viewers often see documentaries as providing answers, but they are really better equipped for asking questions. And one of American Factory ’s most compelling questions is “What’s next?”

The story of Fuyao and the Moraine plant is compelling and revelatory. The documentary’s access to every level of the company reveals the full scope of the clashes of culture and class that define this story. Some of the footage is downright shocking, like when an American manager violently denounces progressive Senator Sherrod Brown’s comments on unionization. Extravagant celebrations of Fuyao, lack of safety protocols and discussions over the logistics of fire alarms are just some of the genuinely intriguing details on display here. And while there is a lightness (almost a humor) to some of the film’s presentation, these details paint a serious portrait of the current state of work worldwide.

From a technical perspective, too, the film is well-made, with solid cinematography and editing. The establishing shots of the Midwest connect the beauty of nature with the bluntness of industrial architecture and the struggles of the working class contained within. Through fly-on-the-wall techniques, Bognar and Reichert are able to pull together brief scenes of home life with the daily hustle and bustle at Fuyao. Union supporters protest while union busters concoct strategies to quash union talk in some of the film’s most fascinating juxtapositions, as the filmmakers’ access allows them to intercut footage of both parties.

In many ways, American Factory is a film about divisions. The gaps between the American and Chinese employees, between union supporters and union busters and between workers and management are all clearly on display. With ample opportunity, however, the film tends not to emphasize unity where it finds it. There are examples of Chinese and American workers bonding over cultural similarities and differences, as they each are shown to adjust to the other. And yet there is little explicit connection made between the ways in which both the American and Chinese workers are linked in their working-class status—just as the American workers must adjust to a changing work environment and fragile manufacturing economy, the Chinese workers aren’t any less exploited by the forces at work in their lives. So while American Factory captures some similarities in human-level struggles, it chooses not to pursue these threads as urgently as it does conflict and occasional reconciliation.

Toward the end, the film also delves into a brief discussion of automation and the future of work. Much of the film gestures towards the future by depicting the Moraine plant in a state of flux, eager to see how the conflicts will resolve or evolve. As interesting and relevant a topic as it is, the change comes somewhat suddenly and seems to shift focus drastically. There is little time for the film’s subjects to address the introduction of automation, and it ultimately feels like a tangential story from the one being told about understanding of work amidst globalization and efforts to unionize. It’s a theme important in the grand scheme of what the film addresses, but seems tangential nonetheless.

When looking at a film like American Factory , it’s important not only to understand the film’s perspective, but also the perspective behind the perspective. This film was the first to be released by Higher Ground Productions, a company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama that has also produced the 2020 documentary films Crip Camp and Becoming for Netflix. So while the film is certainly informative about labor in the U.S. and China, it also carries with it the baggage of serving a political legacy.

The tension between the U.S. and Chinese labor markets has become a hot-button issue as China’s economy grew for decades to become the second-biggest in the world by 2010 (behind only the U.S.). In an increasingly globalized world, the Midwestern labor force is struggling to overcome its staunchly industrial past, as manufacturing employment in the U.S. declined sharply between 2001 and 2010, with only slow regrowth since then. According to the U.S. News & World Report, outsourcing manufacturing jobs to China accounts for two-thirds of manufacturing job loss in the U.S. between 2001 and 2013. China and its increasing dominance in the world economy has remained a key political issue in recent elections, and has also fueled anti-Chinese sentiment across the U.S., blurring the lines between opposition to China’s politics and its people.

American Factory examines Fuyao’s takeover of Moraine Assembly from the perspective of a cultural clash between the Chinese and American workforces. It also broaches the issue of unions and worker solidarity, although it serves the narrative of division more than the one of unity. While Obama has advocated on a pro-worker platform, others argue that during his tenure as President, little was done to help workers and unions across the country, with the reforms he did enact coming late in his tenure. This film seems to have good intentions for depicting the working class, but does not always delve deeply into its most salient issue: the shared plight of American and Chinese laborers and the systems that brought it about.

In the film, while the situation for workers in Moraine dramatically worsens under Fuyao’s leadership, it’s actually a much more complicated story—one that encompasses years of industry in decline, corporate greed and changing international business relations that led to this point. Moraine workers at Fuyao who had previously worked for GM discuss early on in the film how their pay under the new company is lower. While that may be true, GM is not entirely off the hook. The company has had issues since bouncing back from bankruptcy passing on their government bailout money to unions who made concessions during tough times, leading to a 2019 strike . And while that strike was successful, Ohio membership in unions has been steadily declining for decades, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics , so Moraine workers may not have been guaranteed a seat at the table had GM continued to have a presence in the area.

As the film does show, the Chinese workers at Fuyao come from a culture that has also struggled to support its workers, although in a more systematic and government-sanctioned way. Perhaps it can be chalked up to simple cultural differences that Fuyao had to settle with three workers after American Factory ’s release due to the connection between their firing and their support for a union. But that’s improbable, as China’s workers have been trying for some time to form effective labor unions in their country, as well. According to the China Labor Bulletin (CLB), labor unions in China are run by management, not by workers (a detail seen in the film), and all labor unions must be part of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, an organization with bureaucracy and political ties that make it challenging if not impossible for unions to actually stand up for workers (a detail not seen in the film). The CLB also reports that labor activism in southern China has been subject to government crackdowns in 2015, 2018 and 2019. So perhaps boiling it down to mere cultural dissonance doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Opposing views on labor laws and governmental interference have led American and Chinese workers alike to struggle, although in different ways, and the real story seems to be the worker’s battle against unfair labor practices, changing markets and corrupt governments.

This isn’t to suggest that the struggles are the same or equal, but simply to say that both groups struggle on a human level. American Factory does briefly address this shared situation, as the American managers at Moraine take a field trip to China to see how Fuyao is run there. Seeing how the Chinese workers’ lives are intrinsically connected with their work, they’re impressed with the sheer company loyalty on display and, to a lesser extent, shocked at the lax safety conditions. While this sequence demonstrates serious political and governmental differences, it also shows us similarities between Chinese and American work cultures and human behavior; both American and Chinese managers are shown to care about efficiency over worker welfare, and both are frustrated at how they must give into the latter more often than not in Moraine.

Further, the end of the film focuses on the future of the workplace by looking to Moraine Assembly’s future under Fuyao. Automation dominates in the film’s ending narrative, and while that is an issue worth discussing, it seems to ditch the rest of the film’s emphasis on the work cultures of China and the U.S. Perhaps this isn’t for the film to say explicitly, but it seems that the future of work could also be influenced by the human experiences of workers themselves and the way globalization is radically changing how we think about labor—regardless of its national origin.

American Factory highlights how Chinese business in the U.S. hurts American workers, but it doesn’t stop at the problem: its eyes are ultimately on us all to create the future of labor. “What’s next?” the film seems to ask, offering automation and globalization as possibilities, but also leaving open the possibility for a future defined by a a more human vision. After all, a people aren’t necessarily defined by the politics that govern them, but rather their shared experiences and ever-transforming identities.

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Work Cultures Clash When A Chinese Company Reopens An 'American Factory'

John Powers

American workers Jill Lamantia and Bobby Allen struggle to adapt to the expectations of Chinese management in the documentary American Factory. Steven Bognar/Netflix hide caption

American workers Jill Lamantia and Bobby Allen struggle to adapt to the expectations of Chinese management in the documentary American Factory.

In the 1960s, there was a terrific comedy in which a teenage Maoist scrawls a bit of graffiti that would become famous: "CHINA IS NEAR." Half a century on, China is here. It's here on our screens, where Hong Kong protests domination by the Communist mainland. It's here in the tariff war between President Trump and Chairman Xi. And, of course, it's here inside the cell phones we all worship.

China's arrival in the American workplace is the subject of a fine new Netflix documentary American Factory by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, who've spent years chronicling blue-collar lives. Set on the outskirts of their home city of Dayton, Ohio, this measured, deeply moving film takes a familiar idea — the notion of an American factory — and shows how tricky that concept has become in today's globalized economy.

A Chinese Company Brings Hope To Former GM Workers In Ohio

The story begins with a 2008 prologue in which General Motors shutters its Moraine, Ohio, plant, chucking 2,400 union workers out of work and into years of desperate struggle. Then, in 2015, comes hope. The Chinese company Fuyao, which makes glass for automobiles, decides to reopen the plant and hire 1,000 locals. Led by its self-made billionaire owner, Chairman Cao Dewang, Fuyao brings along 200 experienced Chinese employees to oversee production.

At first, the film shows things going OK. True, a worker like Shawnea Rosser is making only $12.84 an hour, way down from the $28 she earned at GM. And true, the Chinese are frustrated that the Americans work so slowly — "They have fat fingers," one says. Still, everyone wants the factory to succeed. Furnace supervisors like Rob Haerr and Wong He become friends, while others seek to understand their cultural differences. When it comes to work, these are profound.

We see this in two contrasting Fuyao celebrations. In the first, a few Ohio workers fly to China and watch the company's New Year festivities, a heavily scripted display of totalitarian kitsch, complete with dancing girls and little kids singing about teamwork and corporate success. The second is the American factory's opening ceremony, at which Ohio senator Sherrod Brown startles and enrages Cao and his American execs by saying he hopes the plant will be unionized. If you think American capitalists don't like unions, try the Chinese Communists.

While Americans expect eight-hour days with vacations and benefits, Fuyao management is used to Chinese employees who work 12-hour shifts, with one day off a month, often sharing dorm-like apartments. The bosses think Americans lazy for talking on the job. Meanwhile, the Americans grow dispirited by the relentless factory regimen.

Reichert and Bognar are clearly on the side of the workers, both American and Chinese, yet their film is no Michael Moore polemic. It's an old-school observational documentary in the very best sense of the term. They don't approach the Fuyao story with a thesis, don't dehumanize the Chinese, don't tell us what to think. Working with 1,200 hours of footage — heroically edited by Lindsay Utz — they have amazing access to a complex economic reality that is touchingly hard on workers.

Eventually, many of Fuyao's American workers get fed up with the factory's cramped, hectoring conditions. I won't say what happens, but watching events play out is an education in the workings of the global economy. From the factory floor to the boardroom, everyone is caught in the logic of the market, which defines everything in terms of the bottom line. If you don't help maximize profit, you're gone. We're not surprised when Cao starts to replace his workers with robots.

Reichert and Bognar capture a reality facing millions of Americans. Even as their wages go down and they long for the comfortable lives folks like them once could afford, workers in China — whose low pay has driven down wages all over the Western world — enjoy a prosperity they've never known. Life's looking rosier for them. Their 12-hour work-day, without time off or benefits, represents the rising model of labor in 21 st century capitalism.

Near the end of American Factory , Chairman Cao strolls outside a glassy, pillared mansion that contains what looks like a shrine to himself. "The point of living is to work," he says. "Don't you think so?" It's hard to think of a sadder, or scarier, line in any movie this year.

American Factory Grapples With the Notion of Freedom

The Netflix documentary charts the economic and social issues that converge when the Chinese company Fuyao moves into a former General Motors plant in Ohio.

“America is a place to let your personality run free.” So goes a cultural briefing for incoming Chinese workers at an auto-glass factory in Dayton, Ohio, the subject of Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s new Netflix documentary, American Factory . “As long as you’re not doing anything illegal, you’re free to follow your heart. You can even joke about the president. Nobody will do anything to you,” a representative of the Chinese manufacturer Fuyao tells his somewhat disbelieving employees.

In 2014, Fuyao bought part of a closed General Motors assembly plant in Ohio and created thousands of jobs, revitalizing a local industrial sector that had fallen on desperately hard times when GM left town during the 2008 recession. American Factory charts the wave of exultation that greeted the arrival of Fuyao, followed by culture clashes, growing pains, and eventually forms of internal and external pushback that had been largely unknown to the company. The film is a captivating examination of the notion of “freedom” promised in that opening presentation: how limited and illusory it can be, and how widely the concept’s meaning can vary around the world.

When Fuyao comes to Ohio, the company brings with it several hundred Chinese employees who have experience in running a large-scale glass-making operation. They’re there to help train the 2,000 new American hires, many of whom are former GM employees, on the intricacies of industrial glass production. The breadth of footage that Bognar and Reichert capture over the next few years is staggering and includes intense labor on the factory floor, boardroom negotiations, and a unionization battle that ripples through each layer of the company. As the Chinese employees are told, in the United States you can freely mock the president and “follow your heart.” But the conditions the Fuyao workers face are challenging, and the locals’ initial friendliness toward the company curdles into something more complex as the United Automobile Workers begin to organize the factory.

Though American Factory is very much a story about two different workplace cultures figuring out how to interact, its narrative also fits with Reichert’s interest in documenting the struggles of American radicalism and its conflicts with the country’s capitalist infrastructure. The director’s past Oscar-nominated projects include Union Maids , which was an oral history of women’s efforts to organize in the 1930s, and Seeing Red , which traced the development of the American Communist Party. In these films, as in American Factory, Reichert presents her subjects with remote bluntness; this is not a polemic, but rather an attempt to understand every side of an unhappy situation.

The first third of the film focuses mostly on the culture clash, with charming scenes of the American and Chinese workers getting to know one another, and fascinatingly candid footage of Cao Dewang, the chairman of Fuyao, touring the reopened factory. Cao’s avuncular personality belies a serious tendency to micromanage, and Bognar and Reichert’s camera follows him as he walks around pointing out architectural details he wants changed, to the American middle managers’ dismay. This expectation of total control is presented as something Cao has taken for granted in China; Fuyao has clearly never had to deal with worker pushback before.

That vision of control is a bit of a fantasy in the U.S., however. For one thing, the former GM employees are making half what they made at the auto plant; more importantly, the glass-making conditions are often strenuous, and the facilities dangerously hot. The workers’ organizing seems inevitable to everyone but Cao and his team of executives, who immediately authorize a campaign to disrupt it. The unionization effort becomes a narrative spine for American Factory , as Bognar and Reichert look in on management meetings, rallies, and the aggressive anti-union rhetoric employees are subjected to in the weeks leading up to the vote.

Still, this is not explicitly a film about the struggles that unions face when organizing 21st-century workplaces. Throughout the movie, even as tensions run high, the filmmakers continue to show idiosyncratic little moments of friendship between Dayton natives and the Fujianese immigrants toiling alongside them. Just as the directors dig into the hardships created by the new factory’s lower salaries, they also reckon with the loneliness of the Chinese workers who have moved thousands of miles from home and won’t see their families again for years.

American Factory could have been made instead as a piece of Michael Moore–style agitprop about the new forms of global capitalism that working-class Americans have to reckon with. Alternately, some scenes could be adapted into a light comedy about midwestern workers who learn about karaoke from their Chinese counterparts, and then enthusiastically teach them how to fly-fish. But this film reaches beyond those categories. The documentary’s wider sweep benefits the viewer, demonstrating the complexity of the economic and social issues converging at the plant. Fuyao’s presence in Ohio is an undeniable boon , an investment in an area where people felt abandoned by U.S. businesses, but Bognar and Reichert’s film is a reminder that capitalism is always double-edged.

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“American Factory” and the Difficulties of Documenting Neoliberalism

neoliberalism, labor, China, Obama, representation

How to Cite

Hitchcock, P., (2021) ““American Factory” and the Difficulties of Documenting Neoliberalism”, Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/gs.857

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Introduction

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary American Factory , a project purchased by Netflix and distributed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020. 1 It is a stunning and poignant movie about how a Chinese company comes to establish an auto-glass factory in Moraine, Ohio, on the site of a former General Motors (GM) production plant. For some, it may not better Reichert and Bognar’s other work on US labor and gender issues and, as they aver, it is strenuously apolitical. 2 Reichert is no stranger to the Oscars: several of her films ( Union Maids [1976], with Jim Klein and Miles Mogulescu; Seeing Red [1984] with Klein; and The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant [2010], with Bognar—a preface to the Oscar winner based on the same factory) have been nominated for awards before, and Reichert is one of the top US documentarians of the last fifty years (even her early work such as Growing Up Female and Methadone strike one as radically rigorous, resonant, and politically incisive). 3 The economic aura of Hollywood will hover at the edge of this critique but here we will focus on the contemporary capacity of the documentary form to capture the specific logic of socioeconomic and geopolitical contradictions.

This image shows Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert filming

Neoliberalism

In order to understand both the achievements of American Factory and the problem of representing the major themes in play, it may be useful to consider the political and economic ideology that forms its backdrop and space of contention. Neoliberalism set out to break the hold of Keynesian nostrums on the function of capital markets and the state. 4 For at least the past forty years, using a heady mix of free trade, globalization, and deregulation, neoliberalism has significantly changed the landscape of production and consumption, and it is hardly extraordinary that culture both expresses and resists this hegemony in political economy. It is certainly the case that cinema as an industry is broadly symptomatic of such changes, but to what extent does film offer a counter logic at the level of form? Several studies have already noted the ways in which documentary and film in general relate to the homilies associated with faith in market forces, 5 but can a critique of neoliberal globalization as a subject also confront the perquisites of marketization in the form of documentary itself? 6 Rather than place the burden of this aesthetic struggle on a single film, I would like to think of American Factory as being caught up within significant structural antinomies of representation, for which some of its solutions are both prescient and problematic in addressing, for instance, the future of the US workplace in a world of globalization. Neoliberalism can be told as story by documentary but not in a way that necessarily changes the manner in which that story is told.

One way to negotiate the intervention of American Factory is to consider its forthright attempt to make tangible the material conditions of globalization concretized in the opening of a factory by Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co., Ltd., (a major Chinese corporation and globally the seventh largest producer of auto glass). 7 The very title, American Factory , announces the paradoxical dilemma of such a project. Does American reclaim a historical identity for industrial production and does that sound not unlike “Make America Great Again”—an ideology and policy vigorously opposed by Reichert and Bognar (although a phrase enunciated by Jeff Liu, the Chinese manager of the factory in the current film)? Interestingly, in The Last Truck , one of the GM workers about to be fired says, “Let’s take care of our own people here. Let’s make it here, buy it here. Take care of our own.” Is this not the sentiment behind a slogan such as “America First”? “Popeye,” the nickname of a vital interlocutor in The Last Truck (he also provided some of the factory interior film when GM refused access to the documentarians), notes that Walmart does not sell anything that is made in the United States (actually, Walmart sells a lot of groceries that are made in the United States, although 80 percent of its total goods suppliers are Chinese 8 ). Popeye continues, “We don’t have a manufacturing base anymore—it’s going to be foreign-owned.” This way of viewing the world serves as a reminder that, in the 2016 presidential election, Trump won Ohio by 8.13 percent (a 10 percent swing—he also won the state’s union vote by 9 percent). 9 To call the factory owned and run by Fuyao “American” is simultaneously to identify and misunderstand the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Reichert and Bognar’s documentary demonstrates this problem, which, for narrative, can be indicated in the contradictory logics of neoliberalism itself rather than primarily in the language of image.

To clarify this further: neoliberalism is not a monolith. It is not simply a mantra or a slogan (and cannot be defeated by one). It is not a single directive and, in true postmodern or post-postmodern parataxis, it does not submit to logical location (this is why, within actually existing globalization, the United States is not solely American; China is not only Chinese). As a further example of the peculiar locution of location, Occupy Wall Street saw no point in actually occupying Wall Street, since all of the stock-trading servers are elsewhere and global finance has no street address. You cannot beat an algorithm with a barricade, but the latter is at least photogenic, representable. 10 If neoliberalism has dimension, it is one of relation, specifically and primarily, of complex economic exchange. It emphasizes individual entrepreneurship, private property, and the decisiveness of markets. It never merely abjures the state but desires one that supports its operative logic strategically. In fact, it can appear sovereign and nonsovereign, nationalist and wildly postnationalist, without ever giving up on its central tenets of flexible accumulation and what David Harvey refers to as “accumulation by dispossession.” 11 Shade it a little further toward markets and it becomes quasilibertarian; color it with more policy and it becomes benevolent state capitalism; mix in some arch ethnocentrism and it can sanction forced labor. Because there is no scenario in which neoliberalism could fully deliver redistribution as public good, it cannot embrace postcapitalism of any kind (which of course does not negate the possibility of it as a precondition). If, as some contend, neoliberalism is on the wane, folks at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the majority of central banks are not yet losing sleep over the prospect. 12 If capital is “dead,” as Mackenzie Wark offers in the title of one of his books, or capitalism is a “zombie,” as Chris Harman puts it in the title of one of his, we have reached the afterlife before actual extinction, and we live in a world of speculation as veritable specters (a novel reinterpretation of Marx on dead labor). 13 This may not sublate in advance the possibility of narrating neoliberalism via documentary and/or social realism, as Reichert and Bognar effectively do, or perhaps even displace, it to a degree, through emphasis on human and humanist empathy, which is very much in evidence in American Factory , but it deeply questions how the globe gets told and who, from within neoliberalism and within any transition from it, gets to tell it.

The Factory Today

To the extent that the ideologies of neoliberalism get sutured at the level of information, American Factory attempts to tell a different story, a mode of counter factualism, whose very anachronism might function as an intervention. It is almost as if because the film does not have time to say, or is not in the time to say it, it disturbs its own field of representation. 14 To some extent, this is indicative of the immanence of labor in the production of the documentary in contrast to the form of labor to which it otherwise dedicates representionality; yet this is compounded by a kind of temporal disjunction, as if US factory labor can only exist as a phantasm that floats among the ruins of postindustrialism. 15 Work today is obviously never only factory bound (and never was, of course), but because wage labor saturates the socius, it places greater pressure on a narrative hook, a mode of distinction at once vulnerable to aesthetics of displacement. One of the many achievements of American Factory is that, in the twenty-first century, it dares to show a factory with labor by workers laboring within it (a cinematic anomaly even at the height of industrialization and rarer still in an economy dominated by service industries). Much commentary has attempted to slot the visual aesthetics of American Factory into a veritable Cold War discourse that pits China against the United States, a kind of bad exploitation of the worker versus an eminently humane version (which is at least one reason why one needs to see Bognar and Reichert’s The Last Truck too). Even at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, there have been calls for a more fair, equal, and sustainable capitalism, and an early booster of neoliberal rapacity, Joseph Stiglitz, can today appear on the progressive talk show Democracy Now! , urge Apple to pay taxes, and believe in a kinder, gentler capitalism. 16 Postcolonial states of the Global South are increasingly overdetermined by this geopolitical tension/whiplash, which, for some, is preferable to rejecting the substance of a false opposition (false only because the winner is still capitalism). 17 Certainly, there are moments in the documentary when the narrative comes close to endorsing a stark China/US division. In a training seminar, when the Chinese expert on US labor relations tells the Chinese workers, “We’re better than them [Americans],” there is a strong possibility that Chinese viewers might agree while US viewers may discover a complementary reflex of jingoistic or xenophobic opprobrium. Certainly, the narrative fights this hopeless binary, but it is not easy because its very form seems to edit out the conditions of its own possibility. Could the absence of such frames or framing be a mode of documentary interpellation, a way of hailing the underlying relation the antinomy of American Factory otherwise represents? Is it useful to think of documentary as symptomatic of what it cannot convey through images? While the pertinence of the nonvisualized is a standard approach to the possibility of the image (in the off screen and off frame, for instance), here it bears crucially on how temporality is perceived, how the “event” of the factory is managed, situated, captured. 18

The History of the Factory

There is, then, the history of this factory. Briefly, Moraine Assembly began as a Frigidaire production facility in 1951—a key moment of US working-class prosperity (after the hardships of the Second World War and previously in the Great Depression) when workers could start to buy the appliances they made. When GM came to this suburb of Dayton in the late seventies, they decided to go big, and the factory became a behemoth larger than the Pentagon, with a capacity to produce over two hundred and fifty thousand cars and trucks a year. Yet, at this very moment, political economy was undergoing key structural changes (in part produced by the upheavals of the early seventies: the oil crisis, the end of the gold standard and Bretton Woods, automated trading, and a growing perception that state-sponsored social-safety nets and unions stood in the way of robust accumulation on a global scale). 19 Not long after the first Chevrolets rolled off the line at Moraine, president Ronald Reagan was already working hard to reduce state and corporate responsibility and ramp up antiunionism. In 1978 China, Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations program kickstarted capital accumulation and joint ventures, soon followed by rapid intensification of the industrial base, the unleashing of a vast reserve of Chinese labor power, and a flood of foreign direct investment and foreign-currency reserves. 20 One of the early victims of the new global order was the US steel industry, leaving the greater Cleveland area and the Mons Valley of Pennsylvania some of the original postindustrial wastelands (pertinently, several complete steelworks were dismantled, shipped by container vessels, and then rebuilt in China). Coincidentally, beginning in 1982, the heartland was visited by the Japanese car industry, and anti–Japanese populism quickly bubbled close to the surface of US culture (seen in films like Gung Ho , Black Rain , etc. 21 ). Yet, the reason Moraine did not close earlier was because labor costs and demand were relatively stable domestically. What changed?

Globalization rapidly reduced labor costs per unit in the car industry. Audi recognized this in China by the late eighties (the Audi 100 was then made in Changchun), but they did not move more aggressively because of legal and economic restrictions on private car ownership in China. By the time GM got their investment strategy together and built a factory in China, companies like Volkswagen (VW) were already well entrenched. At last measurement, GM now has ten joint ventures in China, two wholly owned factories, and fifty-eight thousand workers, each of whom costs less than a quarter of their US counterparts in the United Auto Workers (UAW). In 2018, GM produced over 3.5 million vehicles in China. 22 On the outskirts of Shanghai, the Cadillac Jinqiao factory alone has a capacity to produce one hundred and sixty thousand cars a year. As part of its strategy in China, GM first marketed a US cast off, the Buick Regal, with the logic being that Chinese executives would buy or requisition large sedans of this kind. When the Moraine plant closed in 2008, the last car off the line was an SUV, the GMC Envoy. It is featured both in The Last Truck , of course, and in American Factory , and it now sits in the Carillon Historical Park in Dayton next to a piece of Fuyao auto glass signed by its CEO (the signing event is included in American Factory ). The Envoy was cobranded as the Chevy Trailblazer (which was also made in Moraine). This is significant because the latter became part of GM’s model lineup in China (made in Shanghai). In 2009, the year following the closure of the plant in Ohio that Fuyao would then buy in 2014, GM built 727,620 cars and trucks in China. This capitalist chiasmus is not represented in American Factory at all, but it could be argued that it is its material condition. In its story of globalization, American Factory primarily resorts to “slice of life” aesthetics, which foregrounds the human drama of Moraine but radically truncates an understanding of the worker at a world scale (including the meaning of American in its title). The largest and most luxurious version of the Envoy was called the Denali (an anagram of denial). 23 It is not that the documentary consciously refuses the circumstances of its story, but it is as if the field of vision is also structured by an optical unconscious mediated by necessary economic elisions. 24 Even the most fervent documentary realism cannot assimilate or represent these absences without jeopardizing its capacity to narrate—especially, as in this example, when the film participates directly in the process it might otherwise critique. The logic of the factory in contemporary capitalism is a dynamic relation that does not easily distill in the subject of the factory itself, and film is compelled to measure the difficulty of that disjunction (see figure 9.2).

This image shows the last truck to leave the GM factory in Moraine, Ohio.

The closure of the Moraine factory occurred because GM (United States) basically presented itself as broke. In the same year it produced those vehicles in China, it declared bankruptcy in the United States, with $82.29 billion in assets and $172.81 billion in debt (the relationship between the debt and the investment in its GM Chinese subsidiaries makes for an interesting narrative by itself, not least because it would lead to GM importing its joint-venture Chinese production to the United States following the bailout). If the prelude to GM’s foray into China was a global reorganization of capital and labor, it was the financial crisis that almost killed the US-based auto industry as a whole. Again, this is absent as the ground for American Factory , as is the controversial story of the bailout of GM at that time led, coincidentally, by President Obama. 25 Because of the conditions attached to the bailout, the autoworkers featured in The Last Truck were largely sacrificed as a cost of neoliberal disruption and labor reorganization. The debate about the financial bailout and the terms of globalization continues (Elizabeth Warren, for instance, who chaired the congressional oversight panel of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, wondered how GM’s financial-services division came to be caught out speculating in the housing market in Spain? 26 ). The point is, the story of this factory is indeed a template for understanding the contradictory logic of neoliberalism (and its afterlife). Even with the Obamas’ direct support, the filmmakers do not paper over the excesses of free-market/state-capitalist doublespeak, but the circumstances of The Last Truck present them with nigh impossible narrative demands so that the story of American Factory (which begins with some shots taken directly from its predecessor) tends to record cultural differences around labor practice—some of which, as Reichert and Bognar clearly indicate, are filtered through crude stereotypes. For instance, Americans, we learn from the Chinese cultural consultants in the film, are very obvious: “They don’t hide anything”; “They dislike abstraction and theory in their daily lives”; at work, “they’re pretty slow and have fat fingers” and are even alleged to be scared of heat. The Chinese, according to the American workers at the factory, “refer to us as foreigners, they don’t help us at all, they don’t respect you, and don’t even know what the rules [in the United States] are.” Such prejudice is leavened by comic interludes and genuine human warmth. There is a scene of recently arrived Chinese workers fishing and exchanging pleasantries with local Ohioans. Later, the documentary records a US delegation performing the Village People’s “YMCA” at a Fuyao party in China, and one rep, albeit tipsy, gets teary repeating “we are one” to his Chinese counterparts. And so it goes on, dialogically, perhaps, feeding a narrative about labor relations as basically a question of cultural attitude, not a condition deeply embroiled in market forces. While one position obviously does not exclude the other, the question for the documentary is how they can be effectively mediated.

The Workers

But then, even as cultural difference has generated the most discussion about the documentary among Chinese and US communities (and sometimes between them), 27 the documentary is careful to humanize both sides. Wong He, the furnace expert (and shown to be an inveterate Twinkie eater), is separated from his family for up to two years, which is not just a proclivity of Chinese capitalism but is seen as a necessary condition of labor mobility in the present. The consanguine idea of remittance is old, for instance, but it has become a central mechanism of worker migration (temporary or relatively permanent) in developing countries and a symbol of cheap labor in the developed world (particularly, of course, among agricultural, construction, and domestic workers). While three quarters of labor migration globally is internal—a process of proletarianization from the countryside to the city (led in the last forty years by China, one that stands as the largest migration in history)—almost one hundred and eighty million workers now find themselves in foreign countries. 28 Importantly, both The Last Truck and American Factory signal new regimes of labor management through the precarity this entails. One worker, Rob Haerr, befriends the Chinese at the factory and has them come over for Thanksgiving to shoot his guns but later he is dismissed from Fuyao (apparently for being too slow). Even the head of the company Cao Dewang, referred to as “Chairman Cao” (a title which cannot help invoking Mao Zedong), has reason to worry, not just because of the challenge of US unionism (ostensibly in contrast to the shadow of unionism seen at Fuyao’s headquarters in Fuqing, Fujian 29 ), but because, as a billionaire, Cao is unsure of the benefits of all of the factories he has built (which may or may not spur his extensive philanthropy). Reichert and Bognar suggest, correctly, that capitalism is always a people’s story but, as I have attempted to indicate, the factory itself is a key interlocutor of narrative possibility that yet resists its story in images. The question of unionism is important and long-standing (one activist invokes Sally Field’s character of Norma Rae in this regard), but surely the factory itself is the last gasp of industrialism and that, even though Cao believes it is an important vehicle for enhancing the image of China transnationally, American Factory remains a tombstone to human productive capacity under the terms of labor globalization. 30 Despite this caveat, it is clear that the unionization of any worker across the globe remains an existential threat to capital accumulation. When, on the official opening day of the factory, the Ohio senator Sherrod Brown mentions that he hopes the company acknowledges the workers’ desire for a union, the American managers of Fuyao are apoplectic; one, Dave Burrows, says Brown’s people will never be allowed in the factory again while Cao says bluntly, “If a union comes in, I’m shutting down.” This is read as Fuyao’s imperative but, given the history of the factory and the circumstances of GM’s departure, it is very much part of the political economy of neoliberalism.

This image shows workers inspecting windshields at Fuyao Glass America.

Labor Unions and Globalization

If the conversation between the filmmakers and the Obamas is to be believed (recorded as a supplementary document to American Factory itself), much of the friction portrayed in the main film will become superfluous through the rise of automation. 31 Therefore, if the tone and taxonomy of the documentary is demonstrably and appreciably for labor, the resolution of its story comes close to displacement, as if the mise-en-scène of worker struggle is rendered moot in a flourish. Since Marx wrote of factories as automatons in the nineteenth century, automation is hardly a new discourse (interestingly, it was not seen by Marx as simply regressive regarding the end of capitalism 32 ), but the sight of robotic arms juxtaposed directly with the firing of American workers in the film remains a warning, if not an obvious imaginary mediatory condition for all that has come before. To be fair, automation is indeed a framing device of the documentary (the opening shots are also machine filled), and yet it is clearly not its thesis. You do not have to feature a Chinese auto-glass corporation in Ohio to illustrate the prospect of automation. GM did not flee Ohio because it could not automate its production. The chronotope of the documentary is positioned, if not overdetermined by, transformations in the globalization of capital (accepting, with Trinh Minha, that such determinants do not an unalloyed objectivity make 33 ). Yet, GM goes to China because of its market and because surplus is easy when labor is cheap and relatively unprotected. Fuyao comes to the United States because Americans still buy a lot of cars, and who wants to pay import tariffs and shipping costs? At the heart of American Factory is a constitutive nonsaid—by which, I mean that its formal surfaces seem constrained not to narrate the conflicted globality that is its very possibility. 34 But surely all Reichert and Bognar have to do is invite a few talking heads onscreen to relate the above and the narrative will be said, verifiable, real? American Factory is not completed by making it more sociological, or more attune to political economy, or more consistent with the skillful socialist syntax of Union Maids , a standout film in Reichert’s justly revered career. 35 Even if we say the factory “speaks” in the film, albeit of its own dereliction and aphanisis (its fading or disappearing subjectivity 36 ), are its images adequate to the contradictions of its logic? Is its success its affective approach, a sensitivity to the dilemmas posed that lets even viewers less defined by precarity in the workplace the possibility of appreciation (the problem of audience here would provide another crucial line of inquiry 37 )? While I do not think the film is primed by an appeal to a bourgeois liberal I , it nevertheless tends to obfuscate any outright rejection of that warm embrace. Does the factory, however, become a touchstone about the US economy rather than a tombstone because it is now owned by a Chinese corporation? This question is also not devoid of structural antinomy in how contemporary neoliberalism comes to haunt storytelling in the present.

The polemical heart of American Factory is a lot more than whether China and the United States play political games around tariffs within globalization, but it is a lot less than a critique of the neoliberalism, waning or otherwise, that links global workers through value extraction and exploitation. In part, this tussle between insight and provocation is produced by what has elsewhere been termed the cognitive capture of neoliberalism or, perhaps more formally, dissonance or disruption as itself the salve for global cognition; the logic of neoliberalism’s slippery register disables counter critique by immediately absorbing its discourse as negotiable and/or as monetized. 38 In terms of narrative, several alternative strategies have been proposed, including those that favor some kind of oppositional synthesis and cohesion in the face of discursive fragmentation and blatant incoherence. 39 On the face of it, this sounds user friendly and pedagogically promising, and there are sequences in American Factory that could be deployed in this way, even as such an approach might risk didacticism and stridency. We have mentioned the human story, and Reichert and Bognar are particularly adept at linking cultural difference around the Fuyao project by foregrounding moments of desire for basic understanding and social exchange. This, indeed, is the most translatable aspect of the film’s meaning, often enhanced by the Coplandesque vernacular of Chad Cannon’s score, which, like Lindsay Utz’s editing (a first for Reichert and Bognar), carefully integrates the workers’ experience of each other. Wong’s story, for instance, that of the aforementioned dedicated glass-furnace expert who struggles with separation from his family, provides a sympathetic image of the human costs of globalization. Even so, Wong is willing to defer happiness in order for the Fuyao experiment in the United States to work: “I think the most important thing is mutual understanding.” This is something that Reichert and Bognar’s juxtaposition of personal narrative—mixed with fly-on-the wall misrepresentations of each other by the Chinese and Americans—aims to complicate: how can one now read a corporate multinational? Another worker, Jill Lamantia, a forklift operator, has suffered through the lean times of Ohio’s economy, and we first see her living in her sister’s basement. Regular pay at Fuyao allows her to rent her own apartment and, for a while at least, her life appears to resume some form of normality. Yet the question of labor organization as a way to mitigate the will to precarity in neoliberalism hangs over Fuyao and the film as a whole (see figure 9.5).

The crisis over the unionization of Fuyao’s Ohio factory is the closest the documentary comes to themes that Reichert’s career in particular has emphasized: labor rights, women’s rights, worker dignity, and the capacities of class consciousness. The film offers a significant ideological divide among the workers themselves, some of whom believe that, after years of just getting by (particularly after GM’s controversial departure), management’s job demands are a hardship worth risking. Other workers at the factory side with the efforts of the UAW to bargain on behalf of Fuyao’s labor force, and some join the demonstrations outside the factory gates in support of the unionization effort (those who are deemed “agitators,” including Lamantia, are denied further access to the work site and are fired). To head off the possibility of a union, Fuyao hires (for a reported $1 million fee) a consulting firm, Labor Relations Institute, who are tasked with conducting seminars (with mandatory worker attendance) to go over what might be lost and gained in this regard. The filmmakers include audio secretly recorded by a worker at one of these meetings, where it is clear what kind of “labor relations” the company desires: one based on individual decision (basic stakeholder parlance) rather than the power of collective bargaining. The “no” vote is overwhelming, and the idea of the factory is then much closer to Cao’s vision: a project to improve China/US relations, but not by sacrificing the very work regimens that have made that relationship relevant in the past forty years. While Reichert and Bognar are hardly cheerleaders for this position, Cao himself does not come off as an archcapitalist roader. Indeed, one of the striking elements of the directors’ approach is to provide backstory to Cao’s position, which he seems more than willing to offer (they film him on his corporate jet, but we also see him praying at a Buddhist temple, with his voiceover appreciating the fact that while he was poor when he was young, the simplicity of peasant life was bound up with the intimacy of nature). For Cao now, the idea is stripped of romanticization: “The point of living is to work.”

This image shows the UAW union organization driving outside Fuyao Glass America.

Cao’s worldview is not beyond contradiction and however much he might simultaneously pine for the bucolic and the necessity of labor, his monologue is quickly juxtaposed with what we might read as a visual denouement via the rollout of factory robotic arms that almost literally occlude workers on the shop floor. Subtitles solemnly declare: “Up to 375 million people globally will have to find entirely new kinds of jobs by 2030 because of automation. How workers, governments, and businesses tackle these seismic shifts will define the future of work.” As we have noted, technological advance is not simply a function of neoliberal efficiency, even as it clearly permits a narratological pass for opposing unionism and firing workers on behalf of progress. 40 The subtitles at the end of the film document a certain inexorability to this process that Cao’s company both accelerates and heroically inhibits: “Fuyao Glass America made a profit from 2018. Starting wages remain $14 an hour. The company now employs about 2200 American workers and 200 Chinese workers.” There is profit, there is work, and there is a framework for crosscultural China/US understanding. Must the documentary settle for a description of globalization rather than a syntax that might more forcefully challenge its inertia?

Documenting Labor

Daniel Worden’s Neoliberal Nonfictions argues for the salience of a “documentary aesthetic,” one that, for instance, is “a rejoinder and accompaniment to the ways in which finance capitalism and its intensifications of exploitation, dispossession, and state-sanctioned violence have made the world seem vertiginous and precarious.” 41 On the surface, such a view appears at one with the ambivalent position of the factory at the center of this narrative, although we have suggested its material history could be supplemented and engaged. Nevertheless, when Worden notes that “works that employ the documentary aesthetic engage in juxtaposition, offsetting emotional and personal experience with the structures that produce their possibilities,” 42 American Factory signifies within this lineage, even as documentary itself is mediated by multiple and disparate narrative modes. The question remains about the extent to which the proximity to neoliberal subject relations disables or otherwise renders obtuse reflexive narration and creative modes of critique. On what level might we think of American Factory as counter hegemonic?

In Gramscian terms, this is something of a war of position that intimates a new vision and builds toward an alternative and liberatory hegemony. True, one could be more confrontational as in war of maneuver in Gramsci’s parlance, that seizes on crisis to shake power—but taking it to the streets also depends on a high degree of relative autonomy from the braided front of state and civil society, and its effects are assessed on a case-by-case basis. 43 In the documentary, this would be registered primarily as content, in the struggle to unionize the factory space, yet of course this is neither the scale nor the form of the labor/capital relation I have otherwise indicated. Between gradualism and insurrection, there is no formula for telling the story of the world system as such. Thus, the idea is not to embrace such generic inability but is at least to reflect on the limits globality represents and the persistence of abstraction/displacement that neoliberalism, even in decline, pursues. If naming the factory American introduces a primary antinomy of contemporary capitalism (how to reconcile labor identity with global circulation), are the film’s formal components under any obligation to concretize that reality? In the documentary’s denouement, Reichert and Bognar juxtapose eye-level shots of workers leaving Fuyao factories in both China and the United States. It is a powerful montage that intimates several layers of signification. Some of the distinctions the filmmakers’ visualize include differences in dress (the Chinese uniforms evoke the workers’ version of the Mao suit, a sign both of solidarity and the negative link between uniform and uniformity—the Americans by contrast are not uniformly uniformed through that connotation); the figures of the US workers are much more racially diverse, suggesting a specific and irreducible history of racial capitalism that also pinpoints a key dimension of how a factory might indeed be deemed “American”; the regimen of labor is indicated by revealing the Chinese workers in a shift change (workers are filing in and out at the same rate and an assistant keeps the lines separate and moving; and the differences in facial expressions are more subtle but there is perhaps an unsurprising relief in those for whom the workday is ending, perhaps mediated to some degree by the visibility of the camera and the depth of vision deployed). Cinematic referentiality in this sequence is just as provocative and reminds us that films tell stories that are simultaneously stories about film itself. There is a certain invisibility in worker identity and practice (derived in part from the abstraction of labor as concept in political economy) that cinema has insistently sought to overcome, to compensate for, or radically displace. One thinks, for instance, of one of the first films, the Auguste and Louis Lumière brothers’ project of 1895 called Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory . 44 It is not just happenstance that workers are “captured” in this way; as I have argued elsewhere, the problem of representing labor as relation haunts cinema, as if film must assume worker subjectivity is available, eminently visual, and communicable or else reveal its absence as constitutive to modernity as such. 45 From Metropolis (1927) to 24 City (2008), the workers leaving the factory and/or entering it is a primary if changing challenge of visual art. 46 Labor was always and more so now much greater than the factory worker, yet exiting the factory is a punctum of sorts, a reminder of the passage of a particular form of work and those who do it. It is part of the narrative of neoliberalism that “advanced” or “mature” economies are service based and that Fuyao’s factory near Dayton is a last gasp in postindustrialism. Yet one of the many lessons of China’s participation in globalization in the past forty years is that the farm-to-factory transition is integral to what neoliberalism represents. Such proletarianization in the Global South dwarfs all narratives of industrialization in the West and is a key reason that Fuyao has the capital to locate itself in the US auto market, and GM has the capacity to produce in China. The workers are leaving the factory, but for neoliberalism, crucially, they have not quite left it.

This image shows workers leaving the factory, Fuyao Glass America.

It is too soon, perhaps, to judge whether American Factory marks a key juncture in the reorganization of labor and cinema’s relationship to it, or whether it marks time by being vaguely anachronistic or workerist. The Obamas, in the face of the quandary American Factory presents, argue for uplifting stories, a “higher ground,” and a stubborn yet conscious capitalism. There are few places where Reichert and Bognar polemically challenge that prescription in their documentary, not because the Obamas’ distribution facility becomes part of its process, but because the film’s images empathize with and humanize its subjects so closely as to reproduce the substance of their dilemma. The “last truck” is seen in a museum in American Factory . The reason and systemic logic behind it have yet to be consigned to or to be imaged as history (the image of history as collective—and how to image this time, this socialization). Such a history remains a provocative challenge for storytelling and more, as Reichert put it in her acceptance speech at the Oscars: “Working people have it harder and harder these days—and we believe that things will get better when workers of the world unite.”

The awards ceremony took place on February 9, 2020, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Bognar and Reichert received their Oscar from the actor/producer Mark Ruffalo. Both filmmakers had their heads shaved. Reichert has been struggling against terminal cancer for two years. Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, dir., American Factory (Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2019). ⮭
See Alissa Wilkinson, “Work Is Going Global: American Factory ’s Directors Explain How They Captured Its Challenges,” Vox, August 21, 2019, https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/21/20812012/american-factory-interview-netflix-reichert-bognar . ⮭
In 2019, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presented a retrospective of Reichert’s contributions to cinematic history: Museum of Modern Art, “Julia Reichert: 50 Years in Film,” MoMa, May 30–June 8, 2019, https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5068 . Also, see Jim Klein, Miles Mogulescu, Julia Reichert, dir., Union Maids (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 1976); Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, dir., Seeing Red (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 1984); Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, dir., The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (New York: HBO, 2010); Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, dir., Growing Up Female (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 1971); and Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, dir., Methadone (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 1974). ⮭
There is a veritable publishing industry dedicated to the exegesis of neoliberalism. Some useful texts in this regard include Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017); Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2016); and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ⮭
See, for instance, Daniel Worden, Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020); Anna Cooper, “Neoliberal Theory and Film Studies,” New Review of Film and Televisions Studies 17, no. 3 (2019): 265–77; Michael J. Blouin, Magical Thinking, Fantastic Film, and the Illusions of Neoliberalism (London: Springer, 2016); Jyostna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner, eds., Neoliberalism and Global Cinema (London: Routledge, 2011); and Shakti Jaising, “Cinema and Neoliberalism: Network Form and the Politics of Connection in Icíar Bollaín’s Even the Rain ,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 56, (Winter 2014–2015). ⮭
While such questions may not drive the filming decisions of the documentarians, it can affect the editing process (see note 2). In general, Bognar and Reichert aimed to represent a multiplicity of viewpoints from their almost-three years of shooting and twelve hundred hours of film. For Netflix, this certainly helped smooth issues around marketing and exhibition and, at last count, the documentary was available in at least twenty-eight languages—a remarkable achievement that accentuates the importance of globalization as an underlying theme. ⮭
For basic background on the emergence of Fuyao in the auto-glass industry, see Forbes, “Fuyao Glass Industry Group,” Forbes, accessed December 24, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/companies/fuyao-glass-industry-group/#3b540a5124a2 . ⮭
There is much contention over the exact proportions of Walmart’s product sourcing. On its website, the company claims that its domestic purchases account for two-thirds of the total, but obviously the dollar amount is not distributed evenly for goods procured. Nevertheless, the company promises to purchase $250 billion of US goods per year by 2023. ⮭
Despite victory, the margins were hardly uniform across the state. In Montgomery County, for instance, where Dayton is located, Trump won by less than two thousand votes. My point here is that the sentiments expressed by the local workforce are relatively consistent with Trump’s appeals to his base at that time. ⮭
Obviously, the political tactics of the Occupy Movement were varied and situational and, at times, included taking space itself. For an interesting if informal account of how to “occupy” at the level of economics, see Richard D. Wolff, Occupy the Economy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012). ⮭
Harvey is interested in, among other important factors, the spatial and territorial desires of neoliberal accumulation. See David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register 40 (2004): 63–87. ⮭
For a critique of the centrality of these institutions, see, for instance, Richard Peet, The Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO (London: Zed, 2009); Eric Toussaint and Damien Miller, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); and Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). ⮭
See McKenzie Wark, Capitalism Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (London: Verso, 2019); and Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (London: Bookmarks, 2009). ⮭
The problem of time in documentary film is well discussed. I am thinking in particular of temporal noncoincidence in how film “documents” and the extent to which this can be materially specified. For work on the phenomenological implications of such temporality, see Mahlin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For the most part, American Factory follows spatial disjunction/continuity between the United States and China but it is difficult to relate the longue durée of neoliberal globalization as a function of living memory alone. In what ways could one edit not just the footage of the film but the time of neoliberalism itself? ⮭
Phantom labor usually describes undocumented or unaccounted labor, often deployed to exploit lax rules over migrant workers and terms of employment or else refers to various scams to claim wages for workers who do not otherwise exist. Here I am thinking more of the spectral remains of industrial labor left behind by strategic deindustrialization; for instance, a real person with skills rendered ethereal by changes in the form or location of work. As Reichert indicates at the end of this piece, such workers are specters, not just of what was but of what could be. ⮭
There are many examples of this kind of thinking, but Stiglitz is particularly noteworthy because of his expertise and the gusto with which he argues the case. See, for instance, Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). ⮭
Aihwa Ong is not the first to note how neoliberalism collapses inside/outside demarcations, even if several critics, including Harvey as she points out, seem to reinscribe an earlier dichotomy of the West and the rest. See Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For an alternative reading of both postcolonialism and globalization in this regard, see Sankaran Krishna, Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). If indeed the Global South is being drawn into a new Cold War between China and the United States, it is over the grounds of capitalist modernity rather than through alternatives to the same. ⮭
Event here has to be seen in contrast to Alain Badiou’s conception, which philosophically (and perhaps mathematically) more or less ties Event to a rupture in the conditions of Being, and is thus transformative. Here, event exists as potential and perhaps could only figure in Badiou’s idea as a future conditional. The factory is indeed a historical site, as I detail, but the adequacy of its meaning also arrives from the future, which may necessitate alternative visual registers. This theme is connected to that indicated elsewhere as precarity and automation. It is also related to Badiou’s following comment: “In France, where we’re under the illusion that we live without workers now, we’re aware, thanks to the cinema, that workers still exist in China. A great Chinese cinema has grown up around this very question: What is becoming of our factories and our workers? Such testimony about the world is unique to cinema; no documentary-style reporting can ever be a substitute for it.” See, Alain Badiou, Cinema , trans. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). ⮭
This narrative can be told in several ways. A good example is that of Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century , especially part four in which he considers the changed dynamics of the US economy within financial globalization. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994). ⮭
The Four Modernizations do not constitute an uncontentious topic in recent Chinese history. For an economic perspective, see Satyananda J. Gabriel, Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision (London: Routledge, 2006), especially chapter 8. ⮭
Some of the stereotypes seen in a film like Gung Ho feed off discourses with a long history in US culture. I mention these examples from the 1980s because they tend not only to trivialize culture difference (Americans are also stereotyped) but displace the political unconscious at work in the narratives around the newfound power of the Japanese economy. See Ron Howard, dir., Gung Ho (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1986); and Ridley Scott, dir., Black Rain (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1989). ⮭
Much of this data can be found on GM websites. See, for instance, General Motors, “About GM China,” General Motors, accessed December 24, 2020, https://www.gmchina.com/company/cn/en/gm/company/about-gm-china.html . Michael J. Dunne’s book, American Wheels, Chinese Roads , paints a somewhat rosy picture of GM’s move to the Chinese market. See Michael J. Dunne, American Wheels, Chinese Roads (Singapore: Wiley, 2011). For a critical assessment of GM’s China strategy, see also Edward Neidermeyer, “The Secret History of GM’s Chinese Bailout,” Quartz, January, 24, 2016, https://qz.com/594984/the-secret-history-of-gms-chinese-bailout/ . ⮭
Denali (meaning “high” or “tall”) is the Koyukon name for the highest mountain peak in North America. Given the carbon footprint of some GM SUVs, I find the anagram somewhat apposite. ⮭
For more on what Walter Benjamin means by the “optical unconscious,” see Walter Benjamin, On Photography , ed. and trans. Esther Leslie (London: Reaktion Books, 2015). Benjamin believes that photography is the first technology to reveal this possibility; that is, a visual space at the limits of human intentionality. I invoke it here as a cinematic corollary, particularly regarding how the image figures the logic of the capital/labor relation. ⮭
Given that GM had received an almost $50 billion bailout from the Obama administration, critics were surprised at this eventuality. See, again, Neidermeyer, “The Secret History of GM’s Chinese Bailout.” ⮭
Warren’s point was that, given the taxpayers’ ownership of GM at the time (61 percent), some explanation was owed regarding GM’s financial speculation in property markets across the globe. Partisan critiques quickly followed that accused Warren herself of property speculation in the 1990s. Here, the fate of GM and its factories is mediated by financial decisions typical of neoliberal economics. ⮭
Much of the discussion is overdetermined by the state of China/US relations, which have markedly deteriorated in recent years. The online debate in China is particularly interesting, since the documentary is not officially available for viewing there. That some of the labor issues discussed have such global reach is also testimony to the achievement of Bognar and Reichert in this film. ⮭
The question of global labor migration is at the margin of American Factory yet has a significant role in how the factory today can be cognized at a world scale. A consistently reliable source for research initiatives in this area is the International Labour Organization (ILO), a UN agency. See International Labour Organization, “Labour Migration,” ILO, accessed December 24, 2020, https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/labour-migration/lang--en/index.htm . Much polemical research is available. See, for instance, Michele Ford, From Migrant to Worker: Global Unions and Temporary Labor Migration in Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); and Pun Ngai, Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). ⮭
Again, given the filmmakers’ career-long commitment to labor issues, it is somewhat surprising such differences are not explored further. How a putatively worker state inhibits unions and unionism is a topic too large for the present discussion but it is obviously connected both to GM’s move to China and Fuyao’s deep resistance to the UAW. Given the difficulties in union-organized collective bargaining, Chinese workers have had to resort to other forms of agency. See, for instance, Hao Ren, ed., China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). ⮭
Joshua Freeman shows in his extensive research that, while the functions and form of the factory have changed demonstrably, it still maintains a remarkable presence in the production and reproduction of everyday life. See Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018). ⮭
See Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, American Factory: A Conversation with the Obamas (Chicago: Higher Ground Productions, 2019). ⮭
Marx conceived of the factory itself as a vast automaton that would, in order not just to harness but to control labor power, intensify automation. Yet, since automation presupposes “superfluous hands,” as Marx puts it, “capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.” The production of abject alienation from labor activity is also a sign of how the worker via automation can be liberated from that form of production itself. As Marx puts it, “This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labor, and is the condition of its emancipation.” Of course, the individual experience of such redundancy will be severe where socialization still pivots on the sale of labor power, but Marx is attempting to identify the antinomies of capital accumulation. To this extent, the robot arms in American Factory are, like the figuration of labor itself, “gravediggers.” See, Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy , trans. and foreword Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 690–711. ⮭
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear, and the Lure of Authenticity,” in The Documentary Reader , ed. Jonathan Kahana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 758–62. Trinh puts pressure on the false assumption that the mechanics of documentary cinema permit “authenticity” in representation. In art mediated by difference, difference itself challenges the basis, the “eye,” of the cinematic apparatus. ⮭
In part, this recalls Benjamin’s point again regarding intentionality but it also accentuates the importance of attending to the silences of storytelling that are not themselves produced by the filmmakers’ expressive will. To the art of cinematic silence, one must consider, too, the silences of the text produced by more than cinema itself, including ideological imperatives. ⮭
Reichert’s contributions to feminist and labor documentary art are immense and individual films beyond the discussion of American Factory here would require much more space. Among many pertinent assessments one might include the long interview with Reichert in Alexandra Juhasz, ed., Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 121–36; and Bob Kotyck, “The Good Fight: the Films of Julia Reichert,” Cinema Scope 79 (Summer 2019), https://cinema-scope.com/features/the-good-fight-the-films-of-julia-reichert/ . ⮭
I use this in Jacques Lacan’s sense rather than that deployed by Ernest Jones regarding desire, primarily because it permits a focus on the status of the subject in narrative beyond empirical detail sui generis, the seen, and the sensibility. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 207–8. ⮭
See, for instance, Julian Hanich , The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). ⮭
See Judith Barish and Richard Healey, “Beyond Neoliberalism: A Narrative Approach,” Narrative Initiative, August 2019, https://narrativeinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Beyond-Neoliberalism-Final-8.21.2019-v-1.2.pdf . ⮭
This can also be seen in Lazzarato’s post-Foucauldian critique of autonomy. See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Neoliberalism in Action: Inequality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution of the Social,” Theory, Culture, and Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 109–33. ⮭
There are certainly critiques that think through the implications of automation with employment and class constituency although not beyond dire consequences. See, for instance, Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (New York: Putnam, 1996). As I have already indicated, the specter of automation is not simply outside narratives of emancipation. The question is not about whether automation is coming; it is about the optimum form of economic socialization in which that can take place. ⮭
See Daniel Worden, Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 7. ⮭
Worden, Neoliberal Nonfictions , 9. ⮭
See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), particularly part 2, section 2. Gramsci’s ideas on cultural hegemony continue to influence theory across a range of disciplines. See, for instance, Lee Artz and Bren O. Murphy, Cultural Hegemony in the United States (London: Sage, 2000). ⮭
Auguste and Louis Lumière, “La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon” (often translated as “workers leaving the Lumière factory”), first exhibited in Lyon, France, December 28, 1895. ⮭
See Peter Hitchcock , Labor in Culture: or, Worker of the World(s) (London: Palgrave, 2017), especially chapter 6. ⮭
See, for instance, Ewa Mazierska, ed., Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition (London: Palgrave, 2013). See also . Harun Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” translated by Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim, Senses of Cinema , 21 (July 2002). Farocki notes, “The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory.” The number of films on or about labor is, of course, immense. Those mentioned here that reflect on workers leaving the factory are Fritz Lang, dir., Metropolis (Berlin: UFA GmbH, 1927); and, Jia Zhangke, dir., 24 City ( Er shi si cheng ji ) (North Chelmsford, MA: Xstream Productions, LLC, 2008). The Labor Film Database is extremely useful in this regard but is, itself, like the Lumières’s film, only a provocation. See the Labor Film Database, “Home,” Labor Film Database, accessed December 24, 2020, https://laborfilms.com/ . ⮭

Author Biography

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and on the faculties of Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), as well as Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. He is the author of nine books, including Labor in Culture , Dialogics of the Oppressed , and, most recently, Biotheory (co-edited with Jeffrey Di Leo).

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Film Review: ‘American Factory’

Dayton-based directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert delve into how cultures clash when a Chinese company attempts to overhaul a shuttered GM plant.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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When the last truck rolled off the assembly line of the General Motors factory outside Dayton, Ohio, filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert were there to film it, documenting the end of a certain American dream, along with the unemployment of more than 2,000 people — down from 6,000 in more prosperous times. That was December 2008, and the resulting 40-minute short, HBO’s Oscar-nominated “The Last Truck,” served as a kind of elegy to “late capitalism” that couldn’t possibly have foreseen the next chapter of the story, which would become their feature-length follow-up, “ American Factory ,” snapped up by Netflix shortly after its Sundance premiere, and to which the Obamas have come on as producers after the fact.

In “American Factory,” the co-directors have a very different story to tell about the fate of the GM plant, which was reborn via an unlikely savior: In 2014, Chinese investor Cao Dewang bought the building and reopened it as Fuyao Glass America, manufacturer of windshields and auto glass. The plan was to bring over a core team of specially trained Chinese workers, and to staff the remainder of the jobs with local talent, restoring a degree of opportunity to a community that had taken a drastic turn for the worse in the wake of the financial crisis.

While nothing about Fuyao’s plan was guaranteed to work, one could hardly conceive a more relevant experiment for the modern age: a fresh upset in America’s hard-won Industrial Revolution, as thousands of people in the heart of MAGA country try to wrap their heads around having their checks signed by a Chinese employer. But if there was ever any kind of overt racism expressed toward the situation, Bognar and Reichert either had their cameras turned the other way when it happened or chose not to include it in their film, which instead focuses on optimistic, salt-of-the-earth types grateful to have their jobs back (kind of) and eager to learn new skills from their overseas co-workers (also with a pretty significant caveat).

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Yes, Fuyao offered employment to a devastated community, but it did so at far lower wages than many had earned during the town’s GM heyday, and under conditions that the union never would have accepted in earlier times. The U-word, once such an important pillar of American industry, threatens to undermine Fuyao’s entire plan. It’s first uttered by U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown at a ribbon-cutting ceremony where Chairman Cao and American-picked vice president Dave Burrows can be seen bristling in the audience. Later, as the idea gains momentum, Cao takes a firm stand, threatening, “If a union comes in, I’m shutting down.”

By giving nearly equal attention to the incoming Chinese laborers and a handful of Ohio-based line workers, “American Factory” reveals a stark contrast between the attitudes and expectations of each: The foreign workers make huge sacrifices, spending long hours at repetitive tasks and living four to an apartment in order to send their earnings back to their families, whereas their American colleagues seem inefficient and relatively high-maintenance. The differences are all the more pronounced as the “American Factory” crew follows a team of hand-selected supervisors on a trip to company world headquarters in Fuqing, Fujian province.

There, at Fuyao’s home base, we see how a Chinese factory operates, as workers line up with almost military precision on the job, and perform in morale-building song-and-dance pageants — which may look like some exotic form of propaganda, but aren’t so different from vintage industrial musicals in the U.S., as revealed in “Bathtubs Over Broadway.” Our ways must seem just as unusual to non-natives, judging by an inadvertently humorous/horrifying session designed to brief Chinese workers being sent to Ohio about the local culture and customs. (For such a grim film, “American Factory” can be surprisingly funny at times.)

Technically, both “The Last Truck” and this latest feature are directly concerned with the unsustainability of what we once referred to as the “American Dream” — or the sense that in the U.S., earnest workers are entitled to home ownership and a measure of personal fulfillment. Consider forklift operator Jill Lamantia, one of the Ohio natives singled out as a main subject in “American Factory.” After the GM plant closed, Jill was forced to move into her sister’s basement, but following the arrival of Fuyao, she can afford her own apartment again. As time goes on, however, she realizes that working conditions are unreasonable and becomes a vocal supporter of efforts to unionize.

Time and again over the past half-century, Americans have had to contend with the fact that they are not the only players in world business (the conflict was more pronounced with the boom of Japanese tech companies in the 1980s, and the rise of oil-rich Middle East entities over recent decades), although there’s something in the American character that digs in its heels — like a cowboy defending his turf — to resist the kind of reverse imperialism Fuyao potentially represents. While these attitudes contribute to Chairman Cao’s upsetting but perhaps inevitable decision to replace many of the workers with machines, there’s something encouraging to be found in scenes of bonding between locals and their new Chinese colleagues.

Gaining steam and sparking conversation on the festival circuit, “American Factory” is anything but a dry documentary, and will likely be a prime contender in awards season. According to press notes, Cao wanted to commission a film that would celebrate Fuyao’s historic expansion into the U.S., and though the Dayton-based duo declined to approach it in that way, they benefited from considerable access to the Fuyao founder while framing the narrative in a manner that organically represents the Rust Belt community from which they come. Of all the documentaries you see this year, this one most potently embodies the ever-changing sense of the words “Made in America.”

Reviewed at True/False Film Festival, March 1, 2019. (Also in Sundance, CPH:DOX, San Francisco, Tribeca, Hot Docs film festivals.) Running time: 109 MIN.

Production: (Documentary) A Netflix release of a Participant Media presentation of a Chicken & Egg Pictures production. Producers: Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert, Jeff Reichert, Julie Parker Benello. Executive producers: Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann. Co-producers: Mijie Li, Yiqian Zhang.
Crew: Directors: Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert. Camera (color, HD): Steven Bognar, Aubrey Keith, Jeff Reichert, Julia Reichert, Erick Stoll. Editor: Lindsay Utz. Music: Chad Cannon.
With: Cao Dewang, Dave Burrows, Jill Lamantia , John Gauthier, Shimeng He, Jeff Daochuan Liu, Sherrod Brown, Daquin “Leon” Liang, Wong He, Timi Jernigan, John Crane, Shawnea Rosser, Cynthia Harper, Robert “Bobby” Allen, Rob Haerr, Rebecca Ruan O’Shaughnessy. (English, Mandarin dialogue)

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‘American Factory’ Review: The New Global Haves and Have-Nots

A documentary looks at what happened when a Chinese company took over a closed General Motors factory in Ohio.

By Manohla Dargis

“The most important thing is not how much money we earn,” the Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang says in “American Factory” soon before we see him on a private jet. What’s important, he says, are Americans’ views toward China and its people.

In 2016, Cao opened a division of Fuyao, his global auto-glass manufacturing company, in a shuttered General Motors factory near Dayton, Ohio. Blaming slumping S.U.V. sales, G.M. had closed the plant — known as the General Motors Moraine Assembly Plant — in December 2008, throwing thousands out of work the same month the American government began a multibillion dollar bailout of the auto industry. The Dayton factory remained idle until Fuyao announced it was taking it over, investing millions and hiring hundreds of local workers, numbers it soon increased.

The veteran filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, who are a couple and live outside of Dayton, documented the G.M. plant when it closed. They included the image of the last truck rolling off the line in their 2009 short, “ The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant .” That crystallizing image also appears in “American Factory,” which revisits the plant six years later . The feature-length story they tell here is complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped, spanning continents as it surveys the past, present and possible future of American labor. (This is the first movie that Barack and Michelle Obama’s company Higher Ground Productions is releasing with Netflix.)

“American Factory” opens with a brief, teary look back at the plant’s closing that sketches in the past and foreshadows the difficult times ahead. The story proper begins in 2015 amid the optimistic bustle of new beginnings, including a rah-rah Fuyao presentation for American job seekers . Bognar and Reichert, who shot the movie with several others — the editor is Lindsay Utz — have a great eye for faces and they quickly narrow in on the range of expressions in the room. Some applicants sit and listen stoically; one woman, her hand over her mouth , gently rocks in her seat, tapping out a nervous rhythm as the Fuyao representative delivers his pitch.

With detail and sweep, interviews and you-are-there visuals, the filmmakers quickly establish a clear, strong narrative line as the new enterprise — Fuyao Glass America — gets off the ground. The optimism of the workers is palpable; the access the filmmakers secured remarkable. Bognar and Reichert spent a number of years making “American Factory,” a commitment that’s evident in its layered storytelling and the trust they earned. American and visiting Chinese workers alike open their homes and hearts, including Wong He, an engaging, quietly melancholic furnace engineer who speaks movingly of his wife and children back in China.

His is just one story in an emotionally and politically trenchant chronicle of capitalism, propaganda, conflicting values and labor rights. As the factory ramps up, optimism gives way to unease, dissent and fear. Some workers are hurt, others are at risk; glass breaks, tempers fray. Both the Chinese and American management complain about production and especially about the American workers who, in turn, seem mainly grateful for a new shot. A forklift operator named Jill Lamantia is living in her sister’s basement when we first meet her. A job at Fuyao allows her to move into her own apartment, but like everyone else she struggles with the company’s demands.

By the time the documentary shifts to China, for a visit by American managers to the Fuyao mother ship, it has become clear that something will have to give. The American subsidiary is losing money and Chairman Cao , as he’s called, is not happy. His frustration can seem amusing, but as his dissatisfaction mounts, the temperature grows colder and management becomes openly hostile. For viewers who have never peered inside a Chinese factory, these scenes — with their singalongs, team-building exercises and extravagant pageants — may seem strange or perhaps a gung-ho variation on contemporary corporate management practice (cue the next Apple confab).

“American Factory” is political without being self-servingly didactic or strident, connecting the sociopolitical dots intelligently, sometimes with the help of a stirring score from Chad Cannon that evokes Aaron Copland. The filmmakers don’t villainize anyone, though a few participants come awfully close to twirling waxed mustaches, like an American manager who jokes to a Chinese colleague that it would be a good idea to duct-tape the mouths of talky American workers. It’s a shocking exchange — only the Chinese manager appears concerned that they’re on camera — simply because of the openness of the antagonism toward the company’s own labor force.

It’s these men and women — Timi Jernigan, John Crane, Shawnea Rosser, Robert Allen and so many others — whose optimism and disappointment give the movie its emotional through-line and whose stories stand in contrast to Cao’s own self-made tale. He recalls that the China of his youth was poor; now he is, according to Forbes, one of “China’s richest” and his hobbies include golfing and collecting art. You see the fruits of his endeavors in “American Factory,” in scenes of him relaxing and pontificating. And working too, of course, always working, including in a luxurious office where a couple of socialist realist paintings show him against the sky like a sleekly updated Mao — an image that the filmmakers linger on , letting its meaning bloom like a hundred flowers.

American Factory

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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film ‘American Factory’ Review: A Cross-Cultural Working-Class Documentary

In post-industrial ohio, a chinese billionaire opens a factory in an abandoned general motors plant, hiring two thousand americans. early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech china clashes with working-class americans..

Veteran documentary filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s Oscar-nominated short “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” tracked the final days an Ohio factory that left some 3,000 people without jobs. “ American Factory ” serves as a kind of sequel to that drama, revealing the strange odyssey of the company that moved in. The saga of Fuyao Glass America, a Chinese-run company that overtook the old GM plant and rehired thousands of locals, unfolds as a fascinating tragicomedy about the incompatibility of American and Chinese industries. Arriving in town as its saving grace, Fuyao instead brings a whole new set of bureaucratic problems and enterprising goals often lost in translation.

“American Factory” takes off two years into the factory’s arrival, as over 1,000 people have been employed by the glass-maker and optimism runs high. The company’s hawkish leader, the beady-eyed billionaire Chairman Cao Dewang, arrives at the facility beaming with pride — but it doesn’t take him long to start micromanaging every facet of the plant, leaving his English-speaking senior staff agape. As Cao wanders the grounds with a translator in tow, “American Factory” shifts from an optimistic portrait of a Chinese rescue mission to a dispiriting comedy of errors, like an episode of “The Office” for fans of “The World Is Flat

Chairman Cao and his disciplined staff hail from a separate universe from their American counterparts. At first, managers boast about assigning employees from both countries to work side by side as they endure brutal hours and dangerous conditions, smoothing out car windshields under high heat and risking limbs with heavy machinery. The movie’s sprawling footage sketches out the potential for cross-cultural allegiances, and even pauses to capture workers from both countries bonding over a fishing trip. For a while, Bognar and Reichert linger on details with the rigorous approach to complex institutions found in Frederick Wiseman’s work, where conflict is only part of a much bigger picture.

But it doesn’t take long for the complaints to trickle in: The Chinese complain that the Americans are lazy, talk too much, and generally fall short of the company’s menacing standards. The Americans are baffled by their Eastern peers’ cultish work ethic. In China, an opaque government and socialist business strategies favor the harsh expectations of senior management, but the American factory workers see another path forward, and it’s only a matter of time before talk of joining the United Automobile Workers union gains traction.

Naturally, the chairman’s displeased with this development, dispatching his minions from virtually every angle to break the union talks … or else. The filmmakers somehow manage to capture every angle of this running feud, from alarming boardroom conversations in which Cao threatens to shut down the whole operation to the dozens of workers who see their options from both angles. At its best, this sprawling cinema-verite account plays as a pileup of errors, with Cao’s staffers grousing about their frustrations with the American staff, while union talks continue to accelerate. When Senator Sherrod Brown comes to town for a local event and voices his support, Cao visibly squirms in his seat.

Of course, America has underestimated China for decades, and “American Factory” provides a microcosm of that ongoing tendency; as the drama builds to a union vote, it’s never quite clear who has the upper hand. The veteran filmmakers and their extensive camera crew assemble the situation into a swift and involving account of the mounting consternation on both sides. Trusting the strength of their material, they never rely on extensive title cards to explain the context of any given scene. Aided by Chad Cannon’s playful score, the movie oscillates from an amusing portrait of institutional dysfunction to reveal just how little sympathy Cao has for the concerns of his staff.

Once the union prospects take hold, “American Factory” circles the situation from innumerable angles, and sometimes stalls on redundant observations. But the movie never lacks for insights into the nature of the disconnect. In one hilarious sequence, a Chinese manager attempts to explain American work culture to his staff (“Americans love being flattered to death,” and “You can even joke about the president”). Meanwhile, the Americans remain baffled at the infusion of Chinese culture into their surroundings, including television screens broadcasting propaganda by the snack machines. (“This is America. We don’t need Chinese children singing and praying.”)

Despite these clashes, “American Factory” also illustrates a genuine willingness by the workers to get along. The movie’s standout moment arrives at a company holiday party, where Chinese women and children deliver historic songs about the joys of the workforce before a group of men take the stage to perform “YMCA.” That’s disarming humor of “American Factory” in a nutshell.

Though the origin of this story stretches back a decade, “American Factory” never peers beyond its setting to explore the grander context of American factory life and the threats it faces from rampant globalization. Instead, the filmmakers wisely trust viewers to do the legwork. In 2019, it’s refreshing to see a movie that extends beyond Trumpian rhetoric about the perils of the working class to examine the real tensions of international businesses in human terms. At the same time, it works overtime to see the conundrum both ways, as the filmmakers even spend time with Cao and let him plead his case. Having grown up in a time of economic duress for China, he expresses a passion for leading the charge as his country angles to become the next great superpower.

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Yet even he’s not sure if he’s the hero or villain of this story, and the most remarkable aspect of “American Factory” is that it lets the audience sort that one out along with him. While the movie finds a natural end point, the saga of Fuyao Glass America is far from over. The payoff leaves something to be desired, but understandably so, as the very existence of this documentary sets the stage for a new phase of factory life unlikely to smooth out its troubles anytime soon.

“American Factory” premiered in U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.

Here ’ s where AMERICAN FACTORY 美国工厂 can be seen in late April. Tickets must be purchased through the film festivals, not at the door. TUESDAY, APRIL 16 San Francisco Film Festival 8:30 PM, San Francisco MoMA FRIDAY, APRIL 26 Tribeca Film Festival 8:30 PM, SVA Theater, New York City SATURDAY, APRIL 27 Tribeca Film Festival 3:45 PM, Regal Cinemas, New York City SUNDAY, APRIL 28 Las Vegas Film Festival, Brendan Theaters TUESDAY, APRIL 30 Hot Docs 5:30 PM, Isabel Bader Theater, Toronto Tribeca Film Festival 6:15 PM, Regal Cinemas, New York City THURSDAY, MAY 2 Hot Docs 10:00 AM, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto SATURDAY, MAY 4 DocLands Documentary Film Festival. 3:30 PM, Rafael Film Center, San Rafael, CA Hot Docs 5:30 PM, Isabel Bader Theater, Toronto SUNDAY, MAY 5 Hot Docs 4:15 PM, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto DocLands Documentary Film Festival 7:00 PM, CinéArts Sequoia, Mill Valley, CA ADDITIONAL SCREENINGS coming to Vancouver, Baltimore, Montclair, NJ, MoMA in NYC, Seattle and Austin.

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“American Factory,” a New Netflix Film from the Obamas, Explores the Challenges of a Globalized Economy

By Sheelah Kolhatkar

Two workers work on something in a factory.

On December 23, 2008, a group of workers at a General Motors truck-assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, gathered around a white S.U.V. that had just rolled off the line, snapping photos and holding back tears. In a familiar scene that has played out in industrial cities across the country, the workers had recently learned that their plant, near Dayton, was closing, leaving around two thousand people without jobs; the white truck that they were photographing would be the facility’s last. The plant was larger than the Pentagon; its closure had a devastating impact on the local economy and contributed to a period of severe decline. Automation and the outsourcing of jobs further depressed wages and fuelled unemployment. Then, in 2014, a glimmer of hope appeared. A Chinese investor named Cho Tak Wong (he also goes by Cao Dewang) took over the factory and reopened it as an American outpost of Fuyao Glass, his successful auto-glass manufacturer.

On August 21st, Netflix will release “American Factory,” a documentary about the plant’s second life. The film was made by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, who live about fifty-five miles from Columbus and were described, at a recent screening of the documentary at the Museum of Modern Art, as “the godparents of independent film in Ohio.” Reichert has been making films about the lives of regular American people for decades. In 2009, she and Bognar produced what turned out to be a preview of “American Factory,” called “The Last Truck,” a forty-minute documentary that chronicled the emotional final days of G.M.’s Moraine factory. “We made a film about kids fighting cancer, and there were more tears with the factory closing,” Bognar told me. “American Factory” premièred at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and, shortly after, Barack and Michelle Obama’s newly formed production company, Higher Ground Productions, joined the project. The film is the first of Higher Ground’s slate of upcoming releases, and it offers a glimpse of the kinds of subtly political projects that the Obamas will be backing. (Their list includes a bio-pic of Frederick Douglass , a drama about the challenges faced by women and people of color in postwar New York, and a series that will teach preschool-aged children about nutrition.) The film is also an example of a new category of entertainment in the Trump era: stories about the economic dynamics that have led the country to its current state of political polarization.

In May, I saw the film at the MOMA screening, which Bognar and Reichart also attended. The film begins on an upbeat note. Many of the workers have suffered since the closing of the G.M. plant. One says that her house was foreclosed on. “Ever since then, I have struggled to try to get back to middle class,” she notes, adding that she is currently living in her sister’s basement. Another worker becomes emotional explaining that he hasn’t had a regular job in a year and a half. Fuyao Glass, which is headquartered in Fuqing, China, is one of the largest manufacturers of windshields and car windows in the world. Its customers include major car companies such as Ford, G.M., Volkswagen, and Honda. When Fuyao arrives in Moraine, bringing the promise of jobs with it, the community greets it with excitement. “There was a tremendous sense of optimism and hope,” Reichert told me a few weeks after the screening. The company hosts a ribbon-cutting ceremony with seven hundred attendees at the new Ohio facility, which it christens Fuyao Glass America. Senator Sherrod Brown speaks of the “remarkable community effort” that made the deal happen. Cho, through an interpreter, says that the company expects to hire five thousand local employees in the coming years. The plan is to bring in Chinese managers, and to pair American workers with Chinese employees to help them learn their new jobs. “We are melding two different cultures,” a Fuyao executive announces. “The Chinese and the American.”

Almost immediately, though, the differences between American and Chinese business practices become glaringly obvious. The cinematic result is both inadvertently comical and also upsetting, underscoring how many marks American workers have against them in the globalized economy, in which companies can easily shift jobs to places where wages and regulations are weaker than they are in the United States. Although the workers are happy to be employed again, they know that their circumstances are never going to be what they were. One worker explains that, under G.M., she made twenty-nine dollars an hour. Working for Fuyao, she is paid $12.84. “Back then, if my kids wanted a pair of new gym shoes, I could just get them,” she says. “I can’t just do that now.” Early in the movie, an executive explains that the Moraine plant will be staffed with three different shifts with one unpaid, half-hour lunch break. Upon hearing this, one of the American workers asks, “Is this a union shop?” The answer from management is a resounding no.

The Americans are not prepared for Fuyao’s way of doing things. The Chinese employees are accustomed to working six or seven days a week at the Fuyao plant in Fuqing. They typically live dormitory-style, several people to an apartment. Leaving work in time to get home for family dinner is not part of their routine. (One Chinese worker explains that she only gets to see her child once a year, when she travels from the factory to her home town.) The company attempts to bring some approximation of these labor standards to the U.S., but the Americans, many of whom had previously been members of the United Auto Workers union, begin to complain about their working conditions. Some workers note that the space between production lines is unusually narrow—something that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would likely deem unsafe. The heat that emanates from the four-hundred-degree furnace is overwhelming. At one point, several Americans watch with skepticism as their Chinese counterparts clean up a pile of broken glass by hand, sorting the shards by color into piles so that they can be recycled. Behind the scenes, the Chinese executives grumble about what they characterize as the Americans’ lack of productivity. “American workers are not efficient, and output is low,” Cho says. “When we try to manage them, they threaten to get help from a union.”

The contrasting views illustrate an economic tension that reaches well beyond Ohio. The United States and China are locked in a battle for global economic primacy, a race which has, for decades, placed American workers at a disadvantage. The tech world, in particular, has made note of the willingness of tech employees in China to work punishing hours without complaint. In January, 2018, the venture capitalist Michael Moritz wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times titled “Silicon Valley Would Be Wise to Follow China’s Lead.” In it, he criticizes the American tech industry for being preoccupied with discussions about political correctness and parental leave, whereas in China such conversations are absent and “the pace of work is furious.” His basic point seems to be that, if Western companies don’t try harder to emulate their Chinese counterparts, the Chinese companies will become dominant.

A similar disparity is on display in “American Factory.” The threat of the U.A.W. coming in and organizing the Fuyao plant drives much of the narrative of the film. Fuyao’s leaders make it clear early on that they will not tolerate a unionized workforce; at one point, the company’s chairman declares, “If we have a union, it will impact our efficiency, thus hurting our company. It will create a loss for us. If a union comes in, I’m shutting down.” But the workers continue organizing, and, as the push heats up, Fuyao brings in a labor-relations consultant whose job is to dissuade the workers from voting to join. The Chinese executives seem baffled by the Americans’ complaints and conclude that U.S.-born workers are lazy.

After the screening, Bognar and Reichert sat for an interview at the front of the theatre. They explained that they had tried to craft the film so that both the Chinese and American viewpoints were presented without judgment. When I spoke with them later, they told me that, in many ways, the contrasts in attitudes and practices come from the countries’ different cultures. They also pointed out that the United States and China are at very different stages in their economic development, with China experiencing steep growth that is allowing millions of people to move from poverty to the middle class. “There was a real sense of mission. It was a national mission,” Bogart said, of the Chinese workers. “They’re on the rise,” Reichert added. “While we’re going from solid middle class to very borderline—lower middle class, really—for large numbers of working people. The feeling is, if you look back to your parents or grandparents, they did better than you’re going to do. We’re getting worse; our culture, our country, our society, are going down. There’s not this sense of this great future, while in China it’s just the opposite.”

One of “American Factory” ’s best-known predecessors is the Michael Moore documentary “Roger and Me,” from 1989, which explores the impact of the closure of several G.M. plants in Moore’s home town of Flint, Michigan. The movie brought the struggles of workers grappling with the effects of globalization into mainstream culture. It was also prescient about how the plight of these workers would come to play a central role in the political conversation. It was only fitting, then, that, toward the end of the MOMA screening, as Reichert and Bognar were winding down their interview onstage, a hulking man wearing a baggy jacket and a cap pulled low over his eyes rose to his feet. “Hello, Michael Moore here,” he said. Moore was sitting in the middle of the theatre, and other members of the audience craned their necks to catch a glimpse. “All of your films . . . have had such an important impact on me personally, but also for those of us who live in the Midwest, who grew up in families like that, factory families,” he said. “We usually don’t see ourselves in movies. Our voices aren’t heard. You gave voice to this—to us.”

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The Economist Who Put Stock Buybacks in Washington’s Crosshairs

By Burkhard Bilger

Conflicts in the “American Factory” Documentary Essay (Movie Review)

Introduction.

The American Factory is a documentary that looks at the life of workers at a General Motors (GM) plant in Ohio when a Chinese company called Fuyao moves in. The 2008 economic collapse resulted in GM’s demise, and Fuyao gained hundreds of Chinese workers with experience in the production of vehicle glass. The documentary contrasts Chinese and American labor cultures. The Chinese were impressed by Americans’ devotion to free expression. The Chinese disliked America its people and their culture. The Chinese discovered that various people had varied definitions of freedom, and the cultural gap was palpable. However, the Chinese manager encountered difficulty dealing with American staff who were used to having their say.

Major Differences Between the American and the Chinese Way of Running a Factory

The documentary illustrates the cultural and sociological contrasts between Chinese employees and American workers by comparing and contrasting the two groups. Chinese workers are accustomed to putting in longer shifts than their American counterparts, who are more accustomed to breaks and time off on the weekends (Reichert and Bognar). When the Americans believed they were being overworked and underpaid, another solution they offered was to join a labor union. The Chinese demanded the same level of productivity that they were used to seeing in their home country, but the Americans did not have the same work ethic. The Chinese have a negative perception of the American way of life and work ethic as being lazy. On the other hand, Chinese workers have a strict code of conduct, are highly qualified, and cooperate closely with one another. They worked for longer shifts without making any complaints.

Most of the workers at the Fuyao plant found it difficult to adjust to their new working environment due to the high number of significantly different people who held ideas and values that were opposed to their own. The majority of the workers in the Fuyao plant were Asian and came directly from Chairman Cao’s plant in China. Compared to the average American worker, these people had radically different expectations and ways of life (Steven Bognar). Daily, Chinese workers are under immense pressure to optimize their output and work as hard as possible. Furthermore, they are frequently compelled to work longer hours and are not authorized to express their ideas in any way, shape, or form. As a result, most of China’s laborers are unhappy with their treatment. Since American and Chinese workers are significantly different, Fuyao’s bosses pressured the American employees to adhere to the Chinese culture of regimentation and obedience.

The American employees, on the other hand, were not contented, and they began constantly pressuring the union to take responsibility for the concerns of maltreatment. They also conducted protests to raise awareness of the conditions in the community. As a direct result of the employers’ extreme mistreatment and threats, the bulk of the personnel at Fuyao were dismissed or forced to leave their positions. Both the Chinese and the Americans were subjected to a severe cultural clash (Reichert and Bognar). Since both groups were under pressure to adapt their beliefs and practices to those of the other to cohabit, the mental and emotional stress they were under began to manifest after a while and affected how well people got along. The Chinese were now openly expressing their displeasure with Americans and their laziness, while the Americans were disgruntled with the expectations placed on them and the unequal treatment.

Fundamental Conflict Reflected in the Documentary

Many Americans were abused regularly, and they were intimidated by the thought that if a union or the United Motor Workers were asked to become involved in the company’s business, they would close all activities, resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs. Doing so induced dread of uncertainty in Americans, rendering them hopeless in bringing about change or enlisting a union to become involved in the company’s business and ensuring equality. Furthermore, they threatened that if a union or the United Motor Workers were called to, though they were informed that they would lose their employment, few workers remained stubborn and staged protests. As a result, an anti-protest movement arose, leaving Chairman Cao in dread. To keep the staff, mostly Americans, motivated and involved, the corporation began giving greater hourly compensation.

Furthermore, the corporation began paying incentives to employees to deter them from voting in favor of creating a union, allowing the company to continue operating. Everyone was sacked, including higher-level managers who were present when the union word circulated, and Asians from the China facility replaced them. Everything was now evolving into a foreign-run system with little regard or respect for American employees, and there was no diversity.

Conflicts Can be Resolved, and the Two Countries Can Cooperate Peacefully

Every business has its unique set of vulnerabilities, no matter how much a firm advances, there will always be certain flaws that employees will start to grumble about. Therefore, maintaining equilibrium is essential for avoiding further damage. Since Americans working in Fuyao want better perks, the company can afford to give them to them, but they also need to set a minimum daily production. This accounts for their daily shift requirements, which require them to work 8 hours. Workers are only compensated if they meet production goals during their shifts. American and Chinese workers will be more motivated to do their best if they feel the company is meeting their needs.

In conclusion, equal rest and personal time for Chinese workers with those of American workers would work together toward eliminating any potential for discrimination. Similarly, employees’ injuries can be reduced using effective safety measures. Consequently, if there is cooperation, a harmonic system will eventually arise, and Fuyao Company will profit even more.

Reichert, Julia and Steven Bognar. American Factory , THEFLIXER, 2019. Web.

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Detailed Summary of American Factory (Essay Example)

The film American Factory documents a real-world example of foreign investment, as Fuyao, a Chinese glass company decides to open a factory in the United States. Set in Dayton, Ohio, the film begins with a flashback to the closing of a General Motors plant which cost over 10,000 jobs. As a result, lives were changed as many former GM employees struggled to rebound financially. Jill, a forklift operator who lost her job at GM fell from middle class and was forced to move into her sister’s basement. Similarly, Shawnea, a glass inspector for Fuyao Glass America (FGA) experienced economic loss, citing her hourly wage of $29 with GM versus a much lower $12.84 with FGA. The first time Fuyao Chairman Cao Dewang visited Dayton, he was greeted with appreciation and gratitude for his investment in the local economy; so much so that the factory’s street was named “Fuyao Avenue”. Cao’s plan for FGA was to integrate Chinese workers with their American counterparts, to teach them the processes of glass production and no more. In other words, FGA was to be an American factory, with an American culture, as the two top FGA executives John Gauthier and Dave Burrows were given trust and control.

Throughout the film, the issue of whether FGA would become a union shop lingered. The chairman made it very clear that the company was staunchly against the organization of a union, instructing top management to do everything in their power to prevent workers from unionizing. This matter was amplified at the FGA grand opening ceremony when U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown spoke of his support for a worker’s union at FGA. Dave was reminded of the company’s anti-union position and John was informed by the chairman that if a union formed under his watch, he would be fired. As operations progressed, one thing became clear to the Chinese: American workers were inefficient. Months of inefficiency piled up and resulted in missed goals, and pressure began to mount on John and Dave. Moreover, in the face of the lackluster production, FGA came under scrutiny of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for unsafe working conditions.

With FGA struggling, Fuyao decided to fly a small group of American managers to the company’s headquarters in China. There, the Americans witnessed the daily operations of a Chinese plant and experienced Fuyao’s annual Chinese New Year festival. In China, employees work twelve hour shifts with few breaks in an intense work environment; they also only get one or two days off per month. This results in a far different outcome than that of the American factory, as workers are much more efficient, but they see their families less frequently and have less time for leisure. Additionally, it was revealed that the Chinese workers are part of a union that is run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that works with the company and prioritizes its objectives as opposed to worker concerns. After the experience, the Americans tried to implement some of the strategies/methods they learned in China. For instance, Curt, one of the supervisors who visited China tries to emulate the morning preparation (lineup-style) meetings he saw in the Chinese factory into his American team.

After the China trip, FGA’s productivity continued to fail to meet expectations. This was accompanied by a rise in workplace injuries from unsafe working conditions which prompted considerable union support. Disappointed with the situation that John and Dave oversaw, the chairman fired them both and they were replaced with Chinese executives. This followed throughout the entire organization, as Americans with authority were ousted in favor of Chinese managers. These actions were contrary to his initial philosophy of letting the Americans run FGA, further intensifying calls for a union, because the workers felt that they were no longer empowered in the company. Despite anti-union interventions from the Labor Relations Institute (LRI), a union vote materialized.

The day of the vote was tense for both sides, but in the end Fuyao could breathe a sigh of relief, as there were 868 “NO” votes to 444 “YES” votes. However, the union efforts were costly. Jill, the forklift operator who was mentioned earlier, was very supportive and involved with the unionizers; it is likely that this inadvertently resulted in her termination. In addition, Rob was fired, a furnace supervisor who had developed a close relationship with his Chinese coworker, Wong. Although many American workers suffered from the seemingly cut-throat approach of Chinese management, FGA benefited and started achieving its goals.

At the end of film, the chairman reflects on his life, contemplates the environmental consequences of his numerous factories, and his overall impact on the world. But the most intriguing thing he said was “The point of living is to work”. This quote was particularly impactful because it excellently contrasted Chinese and American attitudes toward work and life; Americans typically work for money and individual motives, whereas the common good and success of one’s group is much more important in Chinese culture. This film exemplified it. Overall, American Factory followed a Chinese company’s international experiment of expanding operations to the United States and the cultural interaction that took place. Cross cultural bonds were formed, (Rob and Wong), conflicts arose (work conditions versus productivity), people were exposed to new work methods, and everyone learned from the experience.

Culture in American Factory

Throughout the film, it is apparent that many of the problems that Fuyao experienced when they expanded to the United States were caused by the drastically different cultural values that were held by the Chinese and American workers. Hofstede’s Five Dimensions of Culture is an approach that is used often by managers to understand the differences between various national cultures. This model utilizes five different dimensions that include power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation that are used to describe a culture’s values. By using this model to analyze the differences between Chinese and American culture, it can be concluded that China and the United States maintain significantly different cultures. For instance, while China values collectivism and considering the interests of everyone, the United States maintains a more individualistic culture where people place more of a priority on their own interests and opinions. Regarding power distance, China has a high-power distance and believes that inequalities between people are acceptable within society, while American culture maintains a much lower power distance in which inequalities between people are not acknowledged as often. Hofstede’s model also showed that China maintains a long-term orientation in which they value the development of their education and technology as a way of preparing for the future, while the United States has a short-term orientation in which they prefer to analyze new information and strive for quick results. Masculinity and uncertainty avoidance are the two dimensions in Hofstede’s model that China and the United States had an almost identical score. Both China and the United States have a masculine culture in which they value competition and success. Additionally, both countries maintain a culture that has a moderately low uncertainty avoidance which means that they tend to feel unthreatened by ambiguity and unknown situations. In summation, Hofstede’s Five Dimensions of Culture can be used to analyze the cultural values of China and the United States; consequently, this can lead to the conclusion that Chinese and American workers struggled to work together in the film because they come from contrasting cultures.

Additional Research

American Factory was based on post-industrial Ohio, where a Chinese billionaire reopened a General Motors plant. Filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar were allowed to follow and film inside the business. The success of the film was average at best, before it was purchased by Netflix and distributed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, which helped them win an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2020 (VanDerWerff, 2020). Thus, Netflix was a major contributor to the documentary's success. A plethora of news articles were then published after the release of the documentary on Netflix. Many of these articles published were based on interviews with current and former employees after the reopening. It was said that “the arrival of Chairman Cao’s Fuyao Glass Inc. and the re-opening of the plant that would soon employ 2,000 people was greeted with open arms. Fuyao was seen as the ‘savior’ of Moraine and its citizens” (Goldsberry, 2020). However, after just a few weeks of production, complaints were being filed toward working conditions and the work itself. Workers claimed they worked more hours for less pay after Fuyao bought the company, causing tension in the workplace. In recent years, the complaints continue to grow with little to no changes. Even with the grievances, the business pulled in around $9.7 million of profit in 2019 (Gnau, 2021). Although like most firms in 2020, there was a substantial decrease in earnings, as their net profit fell below $500,000 (Gnau, 2021). As of now, Fuyao continues to operate in the U.S.

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In 2008, a General Motors automobile factory in Dayton, Ohio was shut down—another victim of the cratering economy. Among the witnesses to its final hours were documentarians Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert , who not only filmed outside of the plant and interviewed a number of the now-displaced workers buy also supplied some of those employees with tiny camcorders to capture footage of the final cars rolling off the assembly line. (The resulting short, “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” [2009] would go on to be nominated for an Oscar.) As it turns out, that was not quite the end of the story for the plant—a few years later, it was purchased and reopened in an effort to bring manufacturing jobs back to the area again. It sounds like the happiest of endings but, as Bognar and Reichert’s latest film, “American Factory,” demonstrates in an ultimately striking manner, that did not quite prove to be the case.

The factory was purchased in 2014 by Cao Dewang, a Chinese billionaire who chose to reopen the plant as the US outlet for Fuyao, his automobile glass-making company. As conceived by Dewang (known in his company as Chairman Cao), the plan would be to hire up to 2,000 workers and augment them with about 200 additional workers brought over from China to help with retraining. In announcing his plans for the factory, Cao talks about how he hopes to change how Americans view the Chinese and demonstrate that they could work together in harmony after all. Is this really possible? To try to cover the cultural gap, we see the newly transplanted Chinese workers undergoing training sessions to help them better interact with their American counterparts—they seem amazed, for example, that Americans are allowed to dress more casually and can even joke out loud about their President. As for the American workers, a number of whom had worked at GM, some may have their doubts but most are willing to overlook that in exchange for a steady paycheck, even it is half of what they were making a few years earlier at GM.

At first, it seems like things might actually work out, especially as each side's prejudices start to recede. The trouble is that there are innate differences between the Chinese and American attitudes toward work that simply cannot be overlooked. As Dewang belatedly discovers, the approach that made Fuyao effective in China—in which workers are seen more as cogs in a machine than as individuals, overtime and working on weekends is considered mandatory and safety regulations and protocols are not strictly observed—will not work here. To try to bridge the gap, some American managers are brought over to China to observe how their system works, but attempts to implement what they've witnessed don't go over well. As Dewang is driven to frustration by the plant’s underperformance, the workers—upset by the stagnant wages and uptick in workplace injuries—begin to contemplate joining with the United Auto Workers, a move that Dewang vows will lead to him closing up shop for good.

As in their past films, Bognar and Reichert employ a quieter approach to the material that lets it unfold without telling you how to feel. That being said, the first half feels a little on the soft side, as some scenes play almost like a spin-off of “The Office” and others seem to go out of their way to show everyone in the best possible light. But once the focus begins to shift from the culture clash to the fight over an upcoming vote on unionization—with Cao paying “consultants” over a million dollars to lecture workers at length on the horrors of unions and then telling them that “you have a voice”—the film begins to toughen considerably as it shows how pro-union workers are being targeted by management for daring to speak out. Although the specific story that “American Factory” may not ultimately be a happy one for many, it is nevertheless a stirring testament to the importance of the labor movement in this country and how it remains as important as ever even as the face of industry changes irrevocably.

Because it is the first film to be released by Higher Ground, the production company formed by Barack and Michelle Obama that signed a highly publicized deal with Netflix, “American Factory” will no doubt find an audience far larger than the typical documentary focusing on the contemporary labor movement. It provides a snapshot of the struggle between labor and management that is both timeless and distinctly of its time. Even more surprisingly, it does so in a manner that is often engaging and entertaining, considering the subject matter. You can almost imagine Bogna and Reichert returning to the plant again in a few more years to complete their trilogy. Then again, considering the implications for the near future found in the final scenes, maybe not.

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

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American Factory (2019)

110 minutes

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Labor issues have been a primary focus for documentary filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar. The couple, partners in work and life, have not had to look far for subjects. They live near Dayton, Ohio, in the heart of the postindustrial Midwest, the so-called Rust Belt where decades of economic decline hit a new low in the aftermath of the 2008 recession.

They captured the deep sadness of that moment in the 2009 HBO short “The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant,” which received an Academy Award nomination (Reichert’s third) for its glimpse at the final days of the Moraine Assembly automobile factory.

But the story had another chapter. The filmmakers returned to the plant in 2015 to chart its revival as a Chinese-owned glass factory, shooting more than 1,200 hours of footage over three years to make the complex and volatile “American Factory.”

“It’s only a short drive from our house to get to the plant,” Reichert said. “But we never thought we’d go back in there again.”

The space, which the filmmaker describes as bigger than the Pentagon, was a dream to shoot in. “Those very bright lights that everyone is bathed in, as they inspect the glass, and you see their reflections, you see people passing glass from hand to hand, stacks of glass and beautiful reflections … we were dazzled by that. The first number of times we went in, we just filmed for the beauty of it.”

Thanks to their long and deep associations in the area, the filmmakers were able to get extraordinary access to the factory and its employees and staff and could maintain creative independence from the Chinese corporation Fuyao and its chairman, billionaire Cao Dewang.

Amid so much optimism around the plant’s resurgence, Reichert and Bognar had no idea of the twists ahead. But seasoned and resourceful observers that they are, they sensed the potential.

“The rivalry between China and the United States is one of the big stories of the 21st century,” Reichert said. “How was that going to play out on the factory floor, and with management and with the chairman flying over from China every six to seven to eight weeks? What was that going to look like?”

In “American Factory,” it looks like an age-old culture clash, with American workers scrutinized through the lens of a punishing Chinese work ethic, amid rising tensions over productivity, profit, safety and, most divisive of all, a campaign to unionize. The Chinese workers, a minority at the factory, gamely struggle to feel at home in the Ohio suburbs, forging bonds with American counterparts they can’t always understand.

The filmmakers and their team had to hop over language barriers by bringing on Chinese coproducers who could gain the immediate trust of workers reticent to engage with camera-toting Americans, even through a translator. In one of the most revealing scenes, a worker named Wong He makes dinner and reflects longingly about his family back home, talking openly with a Chinese field producer into the night. Bognar sat nearby with his camera, “not knowing what was being said and hopefully getting a good in-focus shot.”

Reichert said that inclusive perspective, which extended to Cao and other higher-ups at Fuyao, may have been part of what impressed Barack and Michelle Obama, who selected “American Factory” as the first film to be released by their company Higher Ground Productions with Netflix. “They believe that in order to bridge the divide that we see in the country right now, it’s important that we listen to each other and that we learn each others’ stories,” she said. “Our film really tries to be fair to everybody, really tries to listen to everybody.”

“Everyone,” Bognar added, “has more layers to them than a surface-y sketch can convey.”

Even Fuyao chairman Cao, who might have the most to lose from participating, was philosophical. “They were remarkably gracious about it,” Reichert said. “I know they must have squirmed in their seats at certain scenes. He said, ‘You know, we can learn from this.’ “

The reception back home was not so modulated. “It was almost like a Passion play,” said Reichert, recalling the film’s Dayton premiere, just ahead of its late-summer bow on Netflix. A thousand people saw their community, and its livelihood, reflected on the big screen, adding their own groans and gasps to each scene.

In a city shaken by the tragedy of a mass shooting in August, here was a welcome moment to celebrate. “We were still recovering,” Bognar said. “The town has been ferociously committed to getting together, to not retreating, to being out in public together, acknowledging that we’re a town that doesn’t run away from this kind of stuff.”

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‘American Factory’ Review: How an East-West Labor Experiment Went South

By David Fear

It was going to save Moraine, Ohio — that was the plan. The small town outside of Dayton had revolved around a General Motors plant the way a planet orbits around a sun. Then the factory closed two days before Christmas in 2008, the community took a major hit and the truly tough times began. Six years later, however, hope arrived in the unlikely form of the Fuyao Glass Industry Group, a Chinese manufacturing company. They were looking to expand their presence in America, and the old G.M. plant seemed like the perfect location. Local workers were hired to supplement the Chinese workers the company had brought over (or maybe it was vice versa?), and within roughly six months, the Fuyao Glass America would begin producing automobile windshields en masse. An internationally sponsored rust-belt utopia was right around the corner.

Documentarians Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert knew this area intimately; the duo had chronicled the original plant’s final days in an Oscar-nominated 2009 short titled The Last Truck. Going back to Moraine to record the city’s industrial rebirth felt like coming full circle, though not even these veteran vérité filmmakers probably knew what they would be walking into. The winner of the Documentary Best Directing award at this year’s Sundance and the first shingle-hanging project for the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions, American Factory starts as a portrait of a two-way social experiment — a mutually beneficial mix of helping hands and open palms, both calloused from labor. It ends as a testament to the immutable characters of two national identities, the common ground of global-corporate meat grinders and the notion that some gaps simply can’t be bridged. What we have here in this extraordinary case study is not just a failure to communicate but a profound cross-cultural misunderstanding. And like all of the truly great docs of the past 50 years, its ability to contain multitudes within a single captured moment speaks volumes.

There are hints of turmoil to come in a few tiny tremors near the outset: Fuyao Chairman Cao Dewang casually orders that a lobby’s fire alarms be moved, despite the fact that they’re at a regulatory height; a question about unions at a hiring meeting prompts a smiling but firm response from a recruitment rep. The idea to pair a Chinese supervisor with an American worker is supposed to foster a sense of camaraderie and catch folks up to how the company does business. Transplanted Fuyao employees are regaled with tales of Americans’ blunt honesty and told that in this country, “you can even joke about the President and no one will do anything to you.” (The shot of a Chinese laborer listening intently with a McDonald’s coffee cup in front of him is worth a thousand essays on U.S. cultural footprints.) Later, a handful of American supervisors are invited to a ceremony in the motherland, left to marvel over the moral-boosting musical numbers and cringe at a woman picking up jagged glass shards without safety gloves.

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We meet a local worker who takes several of his newfound friends out to shoot guns and ride his Harley, and a Chinese lineman who misses his family back home. We also get to know several middle-management types from both countries, each struggling to understand “lazy American workers” and screaming Chinese shift leaders with no regards for standard working hours, respectively. A safety regulator futilely tries to make sure standard operating protocols are neither broken nor bent to the point of endangering lives. An obnoxious Ohio native tries to impress his corporate counterparts by joking that if he were allowed to put duct tape on workers’ mouths, their productivity would increase tenfold. (This same man tries to duplicate a pre-shift military procession used in China’s factories upon his return to Fuyao America. It does not go well.) We ride shotgun with United Auto Workers’ members attempting to organize Fuyao’s beleagured employees and a Union Avoidance Consultant paid by the bosses to dissuade folks of the same. Many of these people will be pink-slipped before the end credits roll.

Tempers flare and words are exchanged even before the inevitable boiling point, though American Factory goes to great pains to avoid easy finger-pointing or stock East-vs.-West villainy. Everyone has their reasons, even the somewhat aloof Chairman Cao; everyone has their familiar business practices that feel foreign or outright fucked-up to outsiders. The film is interested in sketching out a bigger picture of labor under pressure, but it never forgets the human beings on both side of the workforce fence. It may come down to collectivity vs. individuality, output vs. speed, numbers vs. quality, pride of achievement vs. just trying to pay your rent — but as one blue-collar grunt notes, “ we’re the one caught in the middle.” Guess who’s ultimately getting the Big Squeeze? Ultimately no one emerges happy, while a somewhat chilling coda about mechanization cross-cutting between shift-exiting workers separated by an ocean suggest that a common enemy is closer than they think. American Factory sets out to chart what’s supposed to be a test run for the future of the auto industry and an example of positive international relations. Instead, it captures a cross-cultural car wreck in slow motion.

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American Factory : Clash of Cultures or a Clash of Labour and Capital?

Written on 22 December 2019 . Posted in Article , Work of Arts .

Author: Anita Chan

American Factory , a documentary released in 2019 by Netflix, has attracted attention in both America and China—even more so after it won the 2020 Academy Award for feature documentary. The film documents the attempts of the owner of the Fuyao Glass Company—an enterprise that supplies 70 percent of the windshields and windows for China’s automobiles—to open a factory in a disused General Motors (GM) assembly plant in Dayton, Ohio, a city that was once one of the sites of American industrial power.

Immediately after the movie was released, a flurry of movie reviews appeared in both countries. For the Americans, it is the first time that the operations of a foreign-owned factory in the US have been so widely publicised in almost 40 years—since the 1980s, when Japanese automobile transplants mushroomed on American soil, stirring up popular apprehensions about foreign investment. This time, the anxiety is about Chinese investment, and can be seen as a proxy for wider concerns about China’s rise and the decline of America’s industrial heartland. On the Chinese side, pirated copies of the film have attracted significant public attention. According to reactions on Chinese social media, viewers in China tend to see the case of the Fuyao plant in the United States as a significant symbolic step towards the realisation of Xi Jinping’s project of ‘national rejuvenation’, to counterpoise Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’.

The film opens with tearful GM workers bidding farewell to the last truck rolling off the assembly line in 2008. Ten thousand workers lost their jobs, and many also lost their houses, community, and hope for the future. Older workers in particular remained unemployed or semi-employed. In 2014, when Fuyao moved in, the town was euphoric—‘Fuyao is the only game in town,’ explains a former GM worker in the movie. The company was owned by a highly-successful Chinese private entrepreneur by the name of Cao Dewang. In television interviews and on Chinese websites, he was lauded as ‘China’s Number One Philanthropist’ and ‘China’s King of Glass’. His setting up of a factory in the United States was regarded as a test of China’s industrial prowess abroad. The factory hired 1,000 American workers, including a sizeable number of older former GM workers. The company also brought in a hundred hand-picked Chinese staff, mostly technicians and supervisors to train the American workers in glass making.

What Type of Culture?

When these two very different groups of employees were thrown together, it seemed like the perfect formula for a classic ‘clash of cultures’ situation. Indeed the word ‘culture’ is mentioned many times in the film by both the Chinese and the Americans . Here, I would argue that there are in reality two types of culture: first, the national, racial, or ethnic culture of the countries the different workforces come from; second, the industrial relations culture emerging from the institutional set-up of the workplace.

Explicitly or implicitly, the film repeatedly emphasises the national cultural difference. For instance, interviewed by a movie critic from The New Yorker , the two directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert were quoted as saying that ‘in many ways, the contrasts in attitudes and practices [of the American and Chinese workers] come from the countries’ different cultures’ (Kolhatkar 2019). This emphasis on national cultural differences gives the impression that Chinese workers by nature are more hard working than their American counterparts. In scenes at both the Dayton plant and at a giant Fuyao factory in Fujian province, the film portrays the Chinese as diligent, able to withstand hardship, and disciplined—qualities apparently lacking in the American workers. But the film also gives the American workers a chance to voice their own self-image as hard working, conscientious, willing to learn, and ready to identify with Fuyao, if only had they been treated with dignity.

At any workplace, there is also a second kind of culture that is borne out of management philosophy, institutional arrangements, and workers’ awareness, i.e. workplace industrial relations culture. This is the culture that in business management studies is often ignored or subsumed under the ‘national’ type of culture. In American Factory , it is this kind of culture that gradually emerges as a sticking point. The development of events recorded in the film shows the shifting relationship between Cao’s management style and the American workers, but the two directors do not make any overt comment and leave it to the audience to come up with their own interpretation. In the process, the two different workforces are caught in the nexus of these two cultural dimensions.

Attempts to Close the National Cultural Gap

At the management level, both the Chinese staff in Dayton and the American management that Fuyao hired hoped that the national cultural gap could be bridged and that they could coexist in harmony for the sake of the company’s success. Both sets of managerial personnel tried to adjust to each other. To make it easier for the American employees and to adapt to local labour laws, the Chinese management agreed to an eight-hour three-shift system rather than the 12-hour two-shift system used in Fujian. The American managers deferentially addressed the overbearing Fuyao owner, Cao Dewang, as ‘Chairman’ and tried hard to be accommodating to his whims. Cao, on his end, sought to appeal to the Americans’ identity. He restrained from hanging up a large painting of the Great Wall in the foyer—the symbol of China’s grandness and superior Chinese civilisation—for fear of impinging on American sensibilities. Instead, he ordered his staff to hang up something American.

On the shopfloor, Chinese and American workers initially also tried to overcome the national cultural divide. They were quite successful, despite the Chinese workers’ superior status in the company’s hierarchy and their authority as supervisors and trainers. The Americans were eager students and acknowledged that the Chinese were hardworking and competent. Despite the language barrier and difference in status they tried to make friends, with some success. ‘We just bonded. We tried to learn from each other,’ remarks an American worker who invited his Chinese colleagues for Christmas dinner and taught them how to shoot, a quintessentially American pastime.

Closing the Workplace Cultural Differences

In organisation studies and international management studies, much research has been done on differences in workplace cultures and how they could be hybridised. This process involves the creation of a third cultural space moulded out of the ‘colonising’ and ‘colonised’ culture (Shimoni and Bergmann 2006). With the Chinese being the coloniser and the Americans the colonised, in the case of Fuyao the authoritative actor in the designing of a hybridising management process would, therefore, be the Chinese management.

Fuyao was aware that to avoid distrust and conflict between the two workforces it needed to narrow the disparity between them. So, although the Chinese workers were more skilled and were supervisors, they were paid less than the American workers. Their monthly wage was exactly the same as what they made in China, which I estimated was about 650 USD (5,000–5,600 yuan) a month. To supplement this low wage, they received a monthly food subsidy of 500 USD, for a total income of about 13,000 USD a year. Since the minimum wage in Ohio was 7.25 USD per hour, the wage and food subsidy together corresponded to exactly the state’s minimum wage. The American workers made an hourly wage of 12.84 USD per hour, which amounted to roughly 25,600 USD a year, considerably less than what many of them had previously earned at General Motors. To put this into perspective, over the past several years low-paid American workers have been campaigning for a 15 USD minimum wage. To make things worse for the Chinese workforce, initially they were not allowed to bring their families. Wong, the film’s main Chinese character, who is used by the film directors to represent the Chinese workers, was under enormous pressure to help get the glass-smelting ovens going and to meet production targets. He admitted that he cried in the evenings out of loneliness but dared not tell his co-workers.

Chinese Management Widening the Cultural Gap

Formally, Chairman Cao emphasised that Chinese and Americans should work together and should equally identify with Fuyao. At the same time, he and his management team devised a divide and rule policy to drive a wedge between the two groups. Even before the factory started production, a Chinese manager’s speech to the Chinese workers drove home the message that there were big differences between Chinese and American cultures, a message that was regularly reiterated at all-Chinese staff meetings. Chairman Cao went further, invoking nationalism and patriotism in his speeches to the Chinese workers:

We have not reached our goal … . We are all Chinese. We were all born Chinese. You were born of Chinese mothers. No matter where you are you are Chinese. We Chinese come to America to open a factory. The important thing is not so much to make money, but how it would change Americans’ view of the Chinese, their view of China.

The message to Chinese workers was clear: because production was not up to standard, they had to work harder not for money but for the image of their country. To boost production, they had to push the Americans to work harder without expecting a wage raise. Money was not their main motivation: their mission was to improve the image of the motherland.

Cao would have liked the Americans to work like Fuyao’s workers in Fujian. He brought a few American managers to see how the mother factory managed work. They were surprised to see that work days began with militaristic roll-calls and drills, and that the young migrant workers worked at a steady rapid pace without regular breaks. One stunned American said it looked like the labour was ‘non-stop’.

Back in Dayton, a speed-up in production duly began, arousing resentment among the American workers. Production could not meet the quotas set by Chairman Cao, who was eager to recoup his investment. The American workers, no longer in their youth, were slow in grasping the skills, with the productivity in the plant in the United States being only about half of that of Fuyao in Fujian. A Chinese supervisor, when pressured to explain the poor production record, muttered: ‘Their fingers are chubby.’ Glass making is heavy work prone to injuries, and the speedup took its toll. Still, reasonable harmony persisted up to this point, as many of the workers were glad about being employed and wanted to give the company the benefit of the doubt.

The American chief manager was suddenly replaced by a Chinese national named Jeff who had lived in America for a long time. Even more than Cao, he began to play the divisive nationalistic card, and the American managers were soon almost completely replaced by Chinese managers. Pressures mounted. On the shopfloor the American workers harboured a litany of complaints: the speedup, the low wage, the disregard for occupational health and safety, the violation of environmental laws, and, above all, the lack of respect. In three years, over 3,000 American employees decided to leave.

By then, the initial sensibilities towards American workplace norms had been thrown out of the window. Former GM workers felt openly nostalgic for the good old days when they made 29 USD an hour with generous fringe benefits. Then they could easily buy a pair of sneakers for their kids, but not anymore. Some American workers held meetings where they poured out their grievances, and began to agitate to set up a union branch. The Chinese workers looked on as a large number of the older workers struggled to unionise the shopfloor.

Clash between Labour and Management

Early in the film Cao vehemently objected to having a union in the factory. Now, faced with a rebellious workforce, he and his management team quickly learned something about how American companies fight off unions. At a fee of one million dollars, Jeff hired a public relations company specialised in fending off unions to design and implement a packet of anti-union activities. The company held mandatory anti-union meetings where the PR company warned the workers that should they strike, they could be replaced; the company got some workers to go around wearing ‘Vote No’ t-shirts; helped to identify and get pro-union workers fired; and appealed to the short-term interests of the younger workers. Jeff raised the hourly wage by 2 USD just before the vote on whether the company should have a union. All the while, the Chinese workers watched on, quietly siding with management. On the day of the vote, the Chinese workers tensely glued their eyes to CCTV screens, and clapped and cheered when it was announced that two-thirds of the workers (mostly the younger ones) had voted ‘no’ to unionise.

After the election, Cao told his Chinese management staff to hire young workers and condition them to the Chinese working culture. Jeff gathered together the American workers who voted no and told them: ‘Now you work for me … . We are a family. Let’s make America great again.’

A Clash of Cultures?

To answer the question of whether there was a clash of cultures at Fuyao, we need to distinguish between the different kinds of culture present—national or industrial. On the shopfloor, in the beginning, despite the difference in national culture, the two groups of workers were ready to be accommodating and work together. With time, there was the potential for the emergence of a cross-national, class-based culture of labour solidarity. But the Chinese management strategically pre-empted the emergence of such a relationship. At the management level, there was no genuine attempt to launch a hybridisation process. Cao and Jeff’s colonising managerial culture eventually trumped the American colonised worker culture. The only feature of the American system that Cao and his team ultimately incorporated into their management philosophy was the American anti-union culture. Unlike in China, which strives for harmonious workplace relations by incorporating and controlling the trade union, the American norm is an adversarial anti-union approach, and Cao was quick to understand and adopt this feature of American management.

Late in the film, Cao inspects the shopfloor and is told that a number of new robotic machines had been installed that could each replace four workers. The directors’ focus then shifts from a new scenario of workers being controlled by management to a future controlled by automation. The film ends on this bleak note, hinting that the spectre of automation-driven unemployment will eventually engulf all workers, no matter their nationality.

Bibliography:

Kolhatkar, sheelah. 2019. ‘“american factory,” a new netflix film from the obamas, explores the challenges of a globalized economy.’ the new yorker , 19 august. https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/american-factory-a-new-film-from-the-obamas-explores-the-challenges-of-a-globalized-economy., shimoni, baruch and harriet bergmann. 2006. ‘managing in a changing world: from multiculturalism to hybridization: the production of hybrid management cultures in israel, thailand, and mexico.’ academy of management perspectives 20, no. 3: 76–89..

Anita Chan is Visiting Fellow at the Political and Social Change Department, The Australian National University. Prior to that, she was Research Professor at University of Technology Sydney. Her current research focuses on Chinese labour issues. She has published widely on Chinese workers' conditions, the Chinese trade union, and labour rights. She is the co-editor of The China Journal with Jonathan Unger.

View all posts by Anita Chan

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Commentary on "American Factory"

Review of the documentary "American Factory", by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, for the subject Contemporary Social History

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The American Historical Review

David Plotke

American Political Science Review

Despite many calls to bring anthropology and history closer to each other in the past, interdisciplinary research symposia happen rarely. This workshop on “re-articulating the factory as an object of study” has addressed this paucity of interdisciplinary conversation, in the idea setting of re:work, which hosts scholars from different discipline. The workshop resulted in a productive, rare encounter between labour history and industrial anthropology, two fields that share similar objects of analysis, but are quite apart as for the methodologies and theoretical approaches they deploy. The workshop aimed at gathering state-of-the-art research focus on the factories, to discern the similarities and differences between the two disciplines in terms of research questions, conceptual vocabulary and methodological tools, and to evaluate the potential for collaborative research in the future.

Stuart Rosenfeld

This analysis of employment patterns in the American South extends a 1985 report, "After the Factories: Changing Employment Patterns in the Rural South," which was based on the years between 1977-1982. The 1985 report included Texas, but this analysis includes only the 12 Southern Growth Policies Board (SGPB) member states. This new analysis extends well into the expansion phase of the post-recessionary period and adds per capita income growth and unemployment rates as rough indicators of the quality of growth. Civilian government and corporate support employment have been added to total employment figures to provide a more comprehensive employment measure. The study also looks more closely at the manufacturing and service sectors, and provides a more reliable estimate of the growth of high technology industries. Also considered are local factors suspected of influencing economic growth, particularly those reflecting human resources, including adult literacy, university en...

Labor History

Nicola Pizzolato , Görkem Akgöz , Richard Croucher

Factories remain significant sites of employment, crucial to capitalism. In the twentieth century, scholars registered achievements in documenting their history, but since the late 1980s, and for a generation, the field lost impetus within labour history although insights continued to accumulate through work in adjacent disciplines. The factory has not featured on the agenda of ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ labour history, but we suggest that it can and should contribute to that broader global project, reinvigorating labour history, not least by contributing a dimension close to workers’ everyday experience.

Business History Review

Gerald Friedman

Nurcin Ileri , Malak Labib

Based on recent historical, anthropological, and sociological work on factories, this blog series explores new methodological perspectives on factories in the past and present. In particular, we seek to open a conversation on the question of space and scale. We look at the ways in which the shifting political-economic regimes and macro-political developments at the national and global scales interact with shop floor dynamics. On the national level, factories were key sites for entanglements of state-building, class formation, and modernisation. For a good part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the large factory laid a claim to define the most significant aspects of life associated with modernity, and became a site of the construction of ideologies, imaginaries, and structures of feelings. The factory has also been a hub for collaborative projects between global and national actors and institutions. The balance of power within these networks was shaped in part by the shifting contours of the geopolitical and global economic order. Yet, local dynamics at the shop floor level also played a role in shaping the transnational flows of ideologies, expertise, and knowledge.

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