Hi everyone!
This is the second of two Certified Fresh documentaries I’ll be reviewing this week. Yesterday, I reviewed “Hail Satan?” (Episode #584), which looked, in part, at a culture clash between two religions, or more accurately, one religion and one quasi-political organization promoting religious pluralism. Today, I’ll be looking at a different kind of culture clash, this one a look at Eastern and Western culture, busting some myths and giving new insights. For a couple other documentaries looking at culture clashes, check out “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail” (Episode #025), “Feminists: What Were They Thinking?” (Episode #291), and “Knock Down The House” (Episode #497).
Before the review, we’ll have a promo form Common Clay of the New West. Every Monday, CCOTNW gives you weird news and pop culture, or in their words, “the same things all the other podcasts do but worse”. You can decide for yourself on Twitter @CommonClayPod and on Instagram @commonclayofthenewwest. Check out their recent episode discussing the Spider-Man controversy and Amazon Prime’s “The Boys”. And some other stuff that will probably gross you out.
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Here we go!
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Today’s movie is “American Factory”, a Higher Ground Productions documentary directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert. The documentary follows the story of a Chinese company named Fuyao opening an auto glass factory in an abandoned General Motors plant in Ohio. Over the course of its initial years, American and Chinese workers work to get the company off the ground, and deal with cultural conflicts in the workplace. This is the first film to be distributed by Higher Ground Productions, founded by former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
No spoilers.
“American Factory” is one of those documentaries you can tell if someone has watched by the way they talk about it. In many ways, the story plays out much like one might expect. An Eastern company, with a different ethos about work and the working environment, attempts to open a factory in a Western community. Both communities learn from each other, not just how to work better, but how to socialize with one another, including a group of American supervisors being taken over to China to see how efficient the same operation can be, and what it takes to make that happen. There’s a lot to learn from each other, and possibly an even better synthesized solution, but it turns to conflict in the form of a labor organizing campaign, throwing those hopes out the window.
You can also tell how much someone understands the documentary by how they talk about it. For anyone who has lived in a post-industrial community, the story of Fuyao has happened with every economic downturn. A wealthy investor secures tax breaks to open or re-open a plant to bring in jobs. An initial boom is met with cost-cutting measures to maintain profits, and eventually only a fraction of the jobs remain, at much lower pay. It’s not really a story about East vs. West, or at least not just a story about that. It’s about how communities, and the workers within those communities, are exploited by the wealthy for profit.
What I admire most about “American Factory” is that it covers a lot of ground in real-time for the story of Fuyao, over the course of three years. Bognar and Reichert has earlier produced “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant”, a 2009 short covering the last truck to roll off the line at the same plant later occupied by Fuyao. Living in the area, they could periodically drive over to capture footage, in cooperation with the company, and I’m sure with a little discussion with producers Barack and Michelle Obama.
We get the unvarnished, real-time outlook from the participants, avoiding the inevitable revisions that come from reflections after the fact. The essence of every person is captured on camera, with as much candor as a camera allows, and we see not only the differences between the cultures, but also the many similarities the working class faces worldwide. We see the immense sacrifices that Chinese workers make to maintain their jobs, which only differs in degree to the immense sacrifices that American workers make for jobs that don’t pay living wages. We also see the similarities between Cao Dewang, the founder of Fuyao, and any American billionaire opening a factory paying substandard wages across the country.
Bognar and Reichert strike documentary gold when the factory goes through a union organizing campaign, and the workers having to suffer through the anti-labor speeches provided by management, and the half-truths that come from that. I’m a former labor organizer, so this is all old hat to me, but for folks who’ve never seen an organizing campaign, this documentary does a passable job, perhaps with a little too much false equity between unions and management, especially for an Obama-produced documentary. I’m in favor of unions as long as we have inadequate laws to protect workers from being exploited or harmed, even if I probably know more about their weaknesses than most.
One last lesson this documentary serves is an example of the future of American industry, fueled by foreign investment and driven by sub-standard wages and opportunities. It doesn’t really matter if we’re talking about the hierarchical communist model within Chinese industry, or the corporate capitalist model within American industry. Both countries run their businesses as dictatorships with regards to the workers, where the owner or investor has almost unlimited control over their employees, at least when compared to the public sphere. If we don’t want this future, then we need to consider true bottom-up ownership, where the workers own the means of production and run things democratically. No bosses. No oppositional forces or hierarchical positioning. I would like to see this documentary to present a possible alternative to the current dead-end of workplace dictatorships.
“American Factory” is a brilliant documentary that picks up where Bognar and Reichert left off with “The Last Truck”, telling the story of a Chinese company opening an auto glass plant in same plant in Dayton, Ohio. The story acts as a lens looking at one possible future for American industry via foreign investment, and shows the very real effects on working class communities. Fans of documentaries about communities and changes in modern industry should definitely check out this film.
Rotten Tomatoes: 96% (CERTIFIED FRESH)
Metacritic: 86 (MUST SEE)
One Movie Punch: 9.0/10
“American Factory” (2019) is rated TV-14 and is currently playing on Netflix.
