In a final scene of the Netflix documentary “American Factory,” the chairman of a Chinese auto glass company walks through the sprawling floor of one of the company’s factories in Dayton, Ohio, as an aide points to different departments where employees will soon be replaced by robotic arms and other machines.
“We’re hoping to cancel four workers in July or August,” the aide tells him, almost proudly, before adding, “They are too slow.”
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Scenes like this are typical in the film, which depicts the fallout after Shanghai-based Fuyao Glass revives a former GM plant and hires many of its former American workers. The employees are at first excited to find new jobs, but soon find themselves struggling to swallow a fraction of their former pay, difficult working conditions and the prospect that, no longer protected by a union, they could be fired at any moment.
The documentary, which debuts on Netflix on August 21, never mentions President Donald Trump by name—but its message is clear: Trump’s promise to reinvigorate the industrial heartland is going to take a lot more than a campaign slogan. There are no easy solutions. And if some manufacturing jobs do come back, they’re going to look nothing like they used to. Americans will have to accept a new reality to stay competitive in the global marketplace—one that they might not like, and one that Trump doesn’t acknowledge.
This message is also coming straight from Barack and Michelle Obama. “American Factory” is the first project to come from the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, as part of the deal they made with Netflix to produce a slate of series, movies and documentaries that reflect their values. Higher Ground acquired the movie after its debut at the Sundance Film Festival.
The Obamas have largely kept a low profile as the 2020 presidential race heats up. The former president reportedly has met with a number of Democratic contenders, and has criticized divisive rhetoric “from our leaders” without mentioning Trump by name. But this film is a statement all on its own. Even though the Obamas have avoided overtly partisan material for their Netflix slate (other projects include a biopic of Frederick Douglass and a preschool series called “Listen to Your Vegetables & Eat Your Parents”), “American Factory” hits right at a central issue of the last presidential election—and likely the next one.
Reviving American manufacturing is also an issue that Obama has tried to tackle before. His stimulus package pumped billions into green manufacturing projects. And his reelection campaign in 2012 leaned heavily on the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, saving auto manufacturing and related jobs across the industrial Midwest. The results of Obama’s efforts, though, were mixed. His administration touted the growth of the wind and solar industries, but overall job gains are unclear. While the manufacturing sector turned around following a precipitous dive during the Great Recession, the growth was slow and steady, and never not quite returned to where it was when he first took office. Now, not only is Obama watching Trump reverse much of his green economy agenda through deregulation, he’s also watching Trump claim to know how to produce the manufacturing boom that eluded him.
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Since he announced his run for president in June 2015, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign centered on his promise to revive manufacturing in areas of the industrial Midwest that had been wiped out by globalization. “We can turn it all around,” he said in one June 2016 speech, “and we can turn it around fast.” Today, Trump is campaigning for reelection heavily in the industrial Midwest, touting a strong record. He told a crowd in Lima, Ohio, earlier this year that when it comes to manufacturing, “We’re bringing it back in record numbers.”
The reality isn’t so rosy. U.S. factory job growth has accelerated since Trump took office. But growth has slowed this year and U.S. manufacturing output fell 0.4 percent in July amid Trump’s trade spat with China. Moreover, a recent study by Economic Innovation Group showed that the largest manufacturing job gains have been in western and Sunbelt states like Texas, Nevada and California. Traditional manufacturing hubs like the industrial Midwest have not seen a similar boost.
And when the jobs do come, they don’t look the same as they once did. “American Factory,” set smack in the middle of the industrial heartland, resets expectations about what it means to be a blue-collar middle-class worker in the United Sates.
The movie begins in December 2008, at the early days of the Great Recession, as the GM plant is shuttered and 10,000 local jobs are lost. The movie then jumps seven years, to 2015, when Fuyao reopens its new sprawling facility in the old factory to great fanfare, hiring a workforce of thousands of American workers and a pool of transferees from China to help them.
But the revival of the factory is far from glorious. One worker says she made $29 per hour “and some change” at GM; at Fuyao, it was $12.84. An early attempt for the workers to organize is met with a warning. When Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) appears at the factory’s opening ceremony and calls for United Auto Workers representation, the Fuyao executives are blindsided. The chairman of Fuyao, Cao Dewang, makes clear that were that to happen, the plant would be shuttered again.
A chunk of the movie focuses on the U.S.-China culture clash that sets in as Chinese workers arrive to work in the plant and as Fuyao tries to impose new standards on the American workforce. In one instance, an American worker complains that the lunchroom’s three microwaves, the only means of a hot meal during breaks, have been on the fritz for weeks. In another part of the factory, a Chinese worker seems unfazed by the reality that he has little time for lunch at all, as he feasts on a diet of just two Twinkies.
The cultural differences are magnified as a group of American supervisors visit the Fuyao headquarters in Shanghai. There, they watch wide-eyed as Chinese workers line up for the start of their shifts as if they were participating in a military drill. One evening, the Americans attend a New Year’s company event that is a strange mixture of corporate pride and patriotism, in which performers sing of “waste eliminated and revenues generated,” and a half dozen couples appear on stage to be married. The American supervisors are amazed. They also are a bit shocked by some of the working conditions they witness at the plant in China, as when they spot a woman sifting through a mountain of discarded glass without much protective gear.
For their part, Fuyao’s Chinese executives struggle with what they see as a slower, more casual American workforce, to the point that it replaces its American management team with a Chinese one, led by Jeff Liu. Liu looks for ways to try to improve the American workers’ performance, even instructing some of his Chinese employees that the best way is to try to flatter them. “You need to use your wisdom to guide them and help them, because we are better than them,” he says.
Yet there is also a weariness among some of the Chinese workers in the U.S. about the sacrifices they have made in the company’s Darwinian push for bottom line results. Some express a bit of regret that their marathon work hours leave them little time for their spouses and children. Even the chairman, Cao, is a bit wistful about the modernization sweeping his country and his own role in leading it.
“I don’t know if I’m a contributor or a sinner,” he says candidly.
The overarching focus is on what modernization and global competition mean for American workers. Directors Stephen Bognar and Julia Reichert, who gained access to the plant and Fuyao executives, following them around over a span of several years, live in the region of the factory. Dayton used to be a community of “folks that worked in factories, but they were middle class citizens. We don’t have that anymore,” Bognar said in an interview. “Workers’ expectations of the security of their life, of their future, are really going down,” Reichert added. “There’s more of an anxiety of the future, and honestly I think that is going to play in the next election, certainly in the heartland of America, where we live.”
The film starts before Trump took office and ends almost a year into his presidency, when life for the workers is still uncertain and wages are still not what they once were. The anxiety captured by the film may have propelled Trump’s victory in 2016, but the high costs of keeping the plant competitive in the global marketplace are not something Trump’s policies have been able to remedy.
This is a problem that resonates far beyond Dayton—and is one to which there are no easy solutions. Trump says his tax cuts have spurred companies to return to the U.S., but there are signs that business investment is getting weaker. Other politicians pitch unionization, but there’s always the possibility that the company would just close the plant rather than see workers unionize. Even Chinese buyouts—not a perfect solution, as the movie makes clear—have slowed. According to the Rhodium Group, overall investment from China fell to a seven-year low in 2018, in part because of the uncertain environment for U.S.-China relations.
As the movie is released, another GM plant in another part of Ohio plans to shut down—this time to sell it to an American electric truck maker. Trump has touted the plans as “great news,” but there are questions whether the prospective new owner has the financial wherewithal to be a savior of lost jobs.
That’s indicative of the way that “American Factory” presents the uncertainties facing the blue-collar workforce.
Near the end of the film, after the Fuyao employees soundly reject UAW representation in a November, 2017 vote, Liu gathers the Dayton workforce for a pep talk and tries to paraphrase Trump.
“We need to create success forever,” he tells them. “Let’s make America good again.”
In a time of diminished expectations, it’s right on the mark.
