American Factory could have been a wilder, more dangerous movie, one that it'd be harder to imagine getting a collaborative endorsement from the Obamas. Fuyao and its chairman Cao Dewang (referred to as “Chairman Cao”) were rewarded with euphoric praise – in a state that had been crushed by unemployment – and more than $6m in subsidies from Ohio state taxpayers.The film shows how this good mood curdled as the workforce realised that to show their gratitude they were expected to conform to the Chinese culture of regimentation and submission, uncomplainingly working six or seven-day weeks, pushing up productivity at all costs and declining to make a fuss about decadent and lazy American indulgences such as lunch breaks and safety precautions. Some of the workers here are affectionate about their Chinese opposite numbers, but this is a sobering documentary in a minor key.Discomfiting and desperately sad ... American Factory.
A Netflix Original Documentary presented by Higher Ground Productions and Participant Media. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Maybe.
Emmy Nominee: Directing, 2 more. Perhaps it is not really a US-versus-China story but the age-old story of capital versus labour, supercharged with a new managerial determination to sweat every last cent from this unreliable human worker before he or she is replaced with a machine.There are toe-curling culture clash moments.
But a culture clash threatens to shatter an American dream.
The management’s main concern was to crush any hint of a union.
This first film in their post-White House careers is an absorbing study of the culture clash in a Chinese-run Ohio car plant‘There is no magic wand to bring back jobs,” said US president In 2014, the Chinese auto glass manufacturer Fuyao bought a former General Motors car plant in Dayton, Ohio, that had been closed since 2008 – promising investment and hundreds of new jobs. Acquired from Participant Media out of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, “American Factory” examines present-day Sino-American relations, with a post-industrial Ohio factory as its setting. The Battle of Homestead Foundation proudly presents a FREE Zoom panel discussion of American Factory, 2020 Oscar-winning Best Feature Documentary, with film directors Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, Braddock filmmaker Tony Buba, and Dr. Louis Picard, director of University of Pittsburgh’s Public Administration Program.. The unionization effort becomes a narrative spine for Still, this is not explicitly a film about the struggles that unions face when organizing 21st-century workplaces. 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. The country is on the verge of a full-scale trade war with China, and Donald Trump is being praised by the right for making deals and creating jobs in defiance of that Obama statement.
American Factory. The workers’ organizing seems inevitable to everyone but Cao and his team of executives, who immediately authorize a campaign to disrupt it. 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.We want to hear what you think about this article. 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. 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. All Rights Reserved. It is excruciating when a motto is put up in the factory office: “Marching Forward To Be World Leading Glass Provider” – and none of the Americans can bring themselves to point out to their Chinese overlords that the word “the” is missing.
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, 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. We are perpetually presented with the spectacle of the slight, deferential and uniformly clad Chinese workers, snapping to attention and occasionally singing the mournfully determined company song in contrast to the big, sloppy and resentful Americans whose bodies are too big for the hi-vis tabards that they are required to wear on their educational visit to the Fuyao factory in China.
This could be nothing more than a bridgehead for a new invasion of machines: simply the prelude to a new era of automation in which the idea of a culture clash will be less meaningful.
American workers will be smiled on if they work cheap – that is, after all, why Chinese goods and workers were beloved by America for so long.
Discomfiting and desperately sad ... American Factory. 2019 TV-14 1h 50m Social & Cultural Docs. 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.
The acclaimed film takes a deep dive into a post-industrial Ohio, where a Chinese billionaire opens a … American Factory review – a sobering documentary by the Obamas 4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars.