Barbara Kopple's 1976 film Harlan County, USA is widely regarded as one of the finest documentaries ever made, and a definitive depiction of the issues surrounding the forces facing the fair treatment of workers and the labor movement since the latter part of the 20th century. Kopple originally intended the film to be focused on the 1969 United Mine Workers Of America election between William Anthony "Tony" Boyle and Joseph "Jock" Yablonski, which ultimately ended in stuffed ballot boxes and the assassination of a family. That event is touched on in the film, but Harlan County, USA instead focuses on how the larger issues of economic fairness affect the lives of people in Harlan County, Kentucky. In the early 1970s, workers at Harlan's Brookside Mine went out on strike against Duke Power demanding safer conditions and fairer wages for people who were living in company provided homes which had no running water. What Kopple's camera catches is years of struggle and strife, as picketers—and Kopple—are shot at by company hired scabs and "gun thugs," workers die painful deaths from black lung disease, and the blue collar people who fight against all of this encounter a system which is stacked against them, even in the institutions and people who were supposed to help them get a just contract.
What makes the movie stand out is how well the viewer gets to know the people in Harlan, and how fundamental and small, in the grand scheme of things, their hopes and dreams are. At the end of the day, what the workers in the film are asking for is not some huge payday or golden parachute. If they somehow got everything they wanted, they'd still be working a dangerous job and living slightly above the poverty line, just with a contract which keeps pace with the cost of living. In the 43 years since Harlan County, USA, the same struggle to make it to the next paycheck, and pray no one ever gets sick or a need for a large expense ever materializes, is a reality which seems to envelop more and more Americans every day.
In 2008, the General Motors truck assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, not far from Dayton, was shuttered in the wake of rising fuel prices, the financial crisis, and GM mismanagement. About 2,400 people lost their jobs, along with all of the damaging effects on the local economy being realized. This became the basis for filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary The Last Truck, which chronicled the lives of workers as the plant closed. In 2014, the Moraine complex was purchased by the China-based manufacturer Fuyao. The new automotive glass factory reopens under Chinese management, “melding two cultures” by becoming a joint operation between Chinese workers brought to Ohio by Fuyao to be trainers and unemployed American laborers who had seen their lives ravaged by the GM closing.
The new jobs and the resurrection of the plant was promoted by politicians and the media as a success and mined as a feel good story. But the truth was a bit more complicated. Chinese managers expect American workers to adopt Chinese working standards, with lax safety compliance while working longer hours for about half the pay they were getting with General Motors. The Chinese workers brought in to train live in spartan condition, packed into apartments which are more like dormitory, working 6-7 days a week, and rarely being able to return home to see their families. Company executives grumble about the lack of productivity among Americans, claiming they are “not efficient, and output is low … when we try to manage them, they threaten to get help from a union.”
These dynamics are the basis for Netflix’s American Factory, Bognar and Reichert’s follow up to The Last Truck, wherein we meet the people who make Moraine’s Fuyao plant function, and see how the clash of cultures are buffeted by economic forces grinding people down in the name of output. The film, which is being released by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground Productions, concerns much of its narrative by the the question of whether the Fuyao plant will be unionized, and the threats which occur after the possibility of joining with the United Auto Workers becomes an issue to both management and local leaders.