There's a visit to headquarters in China, which starts with the executive staff singing the company anthem — "Noble sentiments are transparent/For the sake of transparency" — and it gets more unfamiliar from there. But then a Chinese company, Fuyao Glass America, shows up to reopen it. Read an essay today. 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. 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 This is a movie for activists but also for people who think it's interesting to see how glass goes from hot sand to polished windows, and it spends a few moments on the challenges and pleasures of forklift driving. The safety supervisor, Robert, notes with concern that people are being exposed to dangerous levels of heat inside the factory. The chairman, Cho Tak Wong, is a forbidding presence, alternating between lofty language about character and serious complaints about unions. "This is eternal." 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. "As long as you're not doing anything illegal, you're free to follow your heart. Reichert and Bognar meld sound bites of worker complaints about “the Chinese,” with complaints about workplace safety, pay, and basic respect. And on second watching, I took a moment to look at the view, too, and, yeah, Dayton may be an opportunity zone, but it's underrated. Bobby, a veteran autoworker, has his first workplace injury at Fuyao. 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. At this point, that shouldn't be that interesting, either. 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 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. Danni Wang/Netflix 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. Here at It would be easy to know how to feel about it if it were just the thing it looks like it set out to be, the usual sympathetic story about the American blue-collar worker, with the expected problems and questions: Factories are shutting down, the unions are in retreat, the bosses stay powerful and rich. The directors take their loving time with process, too. 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. At the signing ceremony, I was very proud to say that we are a private company from China and we als… Do we have a right not to work? These are important stories, but they quickly fall into a kind of pattern of hard work and hopelessness. 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. Whatever the reason might be, we don’t get to find out whether many Chinese workers buy 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. "When we try to manage them, they threaten to get help from the union." There is so much more to this movie. And so American Factory is only nominally a film about America. We keep training them over and over."
Workers at General Motors had a union contract and carry expectations shaped by that experience. Nobody will do anything to you." 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. Americans also like to take off weekends.
They marvel at the houses, which seem like antique wonders to them. So this documentary works perfectly, allowing Americans to become acquainted with Fuyao and our Chinese factory. "They have fat fingers. It’s the only thing that sets them aside from their robot competitors, which the filmmakers invoke in the movie’s sobering final scenes. Rather than being a “fascinating tragicomedy about the incompatibility of American and Chinese industries” (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. Noting that they aren't there for the money but to represent their country, he tells them: "It's down to every one of you here." "The motherland is like a mother," he says in one address to the Chinese staff. Workday Minnesota pursues stories from a workers perspective that other’s don’t. The chairman comes to visit, and a manager explains what the Americans are like as workers. It appears to be the site of multiple safety violations and pays its employees significantly lower wages than its predecessor. 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 …