A powerful documentary far more dramatic and sigmicant than its understated title: American Factory

The 2019 Netflix documentary American Factory (Julia Richert and Steven Bognar) is a fantastic look at a clash of cultures and how that affects the American workplace in the post-industrial era. The film is much better and more powerful than its understated title would suggest; it's full of drama, conflict, ideas, and just plain weirdness. In brief, the film depicts - with unusual full access (the factory owners obviously had no idea of the effect of this film on an American audience - the fate of a former GM assembly plant that closed about a decade ago in Dayton, Ohio. After years of stagnation and the kind of economic hardship in the community affected by the loss of thousands of unionized blue-collar jobs, a Chinese billionaire factory owner took over the abandoned plant and under the umbrella name Fuyao began hiring thousands of workers for an auto-glass manufacturing facility. What ensures is a tremendous cultural clash, as the Chinese ownership (and hundreds of Chinese workers consigned to this new factory) have completely different management styles and expectations. The pay is terrible, the workplace unsafe, the push to meet quotas unrealistic and even dangerous - and the Chinese can never comprehend why the American workers refuse to work OT and weekends. Things come to a boiling point when the American workers try to unionize, and the Chinese spend about a $1 million to block the effort. We see close up the near-enslavement of workers - particularly the Chinese workers sent to the U.S. and separated from their families, living her in incredibly Spartan poverty. The best part of the movie by far is the account of a visit to the HQ in China by a team of American workers, who are amazed and befuddled by everything they see in the Chinese workplace: the militaristic approach to forming workplace "teams," the paternalism, the bizarre (to us) worship of the founder/CEO and of the company itself, the lavish but strange entertainment at a New Year's celebration - all leaving us (as well as some, though not all, of the visiting workers) fully aware that this partnership is bound to fail. Near the end of the documentary, there's quite a kicker, which I won't divulge. This film should be required viewing in any program that looks at labor-management relations or at U.S.-China business partnerships - though you don't have to be a specialist to be caught up in the drama and pathos of this powerful film.