In December 2008, the last truck rolled off the assembly line of the GM plant in Dayton, Ohio. Its closing left thousands of people out of work. Then, in 2014, a Chinese company called Fuyao Glass reopened the factory to serve as its American arm, and hired a workforce, including many former GM employees, to make automotive glass. Chinese managers were brought to Dayton to supervise the Americans.
The story is yet another chapter in American manufacturing’s inexorable march toward globalization, and it’s told in intimate, fascinating detail in the new documentary American Factory, which is now streaming on Netflix. And as you might guess, there are some bumps in the road.
Directed by veteran documentarians Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert, American Factory chronicles the plant’s reopening and the years after it, mostly in fly-on-the-wall fashion. (It’s also the first film from Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, which has partnered with Netflix to distribute a slate of programming.) Daytonians who struggled after they were laid off from GM rejoice when they are rehired by the new company, but soon find that their expectations about labor practices and corporate culture clash with the new management’s ideals.
The film tracks American and Chinese workers and managers through a years-long period of adjustment, some of it quite rocky. At times, it’s a bit humorous; at others, it’s more grave. Differences in American and Chinese ideas about loyalty to your employer, safety on the factory floor, working overtime, and much more come to the foreground. And when the workers at Fuyao Glass America decide to unionize, trouble follows.
Reichert (whose 50-year career in documentary filmmaking has often examined the American working class) and Bognar, who often work together, knew what they were doing in choosing this factory as their subject. They both live in Dayton, and in their 2009 short documentary The Last Truck, they captured the closing of the GM plant and its effects on the surrounding community, mostly through interviews with workers who were losing their jobs.
I spoke with Reichert and Bognar by phone about how they built trust with workers and management, the cultural challenges they observed on the factory floor, and what they learned about the future of work in a globalized economy. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Alissa Wilkinson
You’d previously made a short documentary, The Last Truck, about the closing of the GM plant in late 2008. What drove you to make this one?
Julia Reichert
Yeah. The whole story takes place in our hometown, Dayton, Ohio, and in a similar city in China. We all know that there’s been a rivalry between China and the US for most of the 21st century. It’s a big thing that we all are concerned with, and we wanted to see how it was going to play out.
General Motors left our town, and [the factory] was then bought by a Chinese billionaire. We realized that we could see up close and intimately what was going to happen when hundreds of Chinese people came over here to work — to our town, to take up residence here. They had to learn about our culture, had to learn how to cut the grass, how our grocery stores and shopping malls work. We were also going to see the impact of a Chinese owner and Chinese management on our proud but beaten-down blue-collar workers.
We thought, wow. Whatever happens — whatever the story is going to be — it’s going to be really interesting and relevant, and we have a close-up view of it because we live here. We can just drive over.
Alissa Wilkinson
It definitely has the feel of a documentary where the filmmakers know the community, rather than just parachuting in to make a movie. But even so, you had to build relationships with the people who work in the factory and manage the company in order to make the kind of film you did. How did you foster trust?
Steve Bognar
We had great access from the company itself, but that doesn’t mean we have access to any individual who’s working on that factory floor. Every single person we filmed had to give us the okay to hang out with them, and then we had to build trust and relationships with everybody.
The way you do that is by showing up again and again and again. We’re a 25-minute drive from that plant. We went there hundreds and hundreds of times. We filmed for basically three years, from February 2015 to the end of December 2017, and we’ve got over 1,200 hours of footage. We had five camera people going in there regularly, following different people who work in that plant.
We had to tell everyone again and again that this was an independent film. It wasn’t sponsored by the company. We were going to try to include everyone’s point of view, even if those points of view didn’t agree with each other. But it just takes time to really be there before people say, “Okay, I guess you’re part of this now.”
Alissa Wilkinson
So you’re in the factory a lot, filming, and covering everything going on in there. It’s a very interesting place visually, with big pieces of glass rolling off the assembly line and all kinds of equipment. How did you approach shooting a film that was visually interesting as well as narratively coherent?
Steve Bognar
We had five main camera people. I mean Julia, myself, Jeff Reichert, Aubrey Keith, and Erick Stoll. Each of us had to actually be a documentarian, not just a camera person being told what to shoot by [a director] standing next to them. Aubrey, Erick, Jeff, Julia and me, we would be on our own, deep inside the factory, hanging out with a certain group of people in a certain pocket of the factory. We’d have to use our own instincts to say, “Okay, what’s going on? Where’s the dynamics? Where’s the tension? Where’s the conflict? Who’s going through something hard right now?” We had to follow them.
Sounds mattered hugely. People don’t talk about sound enough in documentaries, but we would put lavalier mics on people inside the factory. We thought about using the boom pole, but it was just too darn loud to hear anything. The only way we could have any kind of intimacy was lavalier mic.
Then we also started doing audio-only interviews. You know the scenes that show you people, and you sort of feel like you’re hearing the thoughts in their head? We realized that factory jobs are very repetitive and your mind starts to wander. Have you ever had a job where you’re doing the same thing over and over and your mind can drift, whether it’s dish washing or whatever. We tried to evoke the interior monologue of a person’s life by seeing them at work, but then sitting down in their home after work in a quiet space, asking them to speak intimately and quietly, and then recording their more reflective thoughts. Some of those audio interviews were recorded at two o’clock in the morning, in people’s homes. That’s when we feel like we got to hear the interior monologue, or soulful thinking of the people.
Julia Reichert
It’s actually a really good question that hardly anybody ever asks: How did we, as a team, decide how to cover this story? Me and Steve are used to working with just the two of us, and then maybe we bring in a few additional people for a big day. We’ve never hired an editor before — this was our first time.
One of the things we realized we had to do was [identify] a kind of unifying question and then elaborate on that question. The unifying question at first was, “Will this endeavor succeed?” This whole big idea: Chinese-owned plants in blue-collar America, 2,000 workers and 300 supervisors and trainers. Will that succeed?
But what we realized after a while — and we all talked about it — was that success is different for each level of employee in that business. Success for the owner is different from success for the blue-collar worker, who wants to know, “Will these jobs ever become good jobs?” Success for the management, success for the engineers means something different. Will they be able to fulfill the orders? Will they be able to support profits?
What we realized is everyone in there was facing big challenges. There could be no bad guys and good guys, because everyone had their own goals. Everyone had their sense of what was success, and everyone was under a huge amount of pressure in different ways. Everyone’s trying their best.
Steve Bognar
Early on we realized also we’re missing a huge part of the story because we’re not Chinese and we don’t speak Mandarin Chinese. That’s when we started realizing we needed to bring on Chinese collaborators, filmmakers who both knew storytelling but also were culturally and linguistically Chinese. That’s when we found Yiqian Zhang and Mijie Li, one or both of whom started coming to Ohio every month. Then, with them, we also went to China, and they taught us a lot. They were essential to us connecting with Chinese characters in the film, but they also taught us so much.
Julia Reichert
So much about Chinese culture, because they were all born and raised in China, so they could help us understand the work life, the educational system, and where China was in its history, in terms of coming out of rural poverty and starvation into this booming middle class that they have now. That was probably our biggest challenge: Coming to understand Chinese culture.
Steve Bognar
Like anyone who reads the paper, we kind of knew, “Oh yeah, China’s been on this amazing upward trajectory.” But what Mijie and Yiqian taught us was what that feels like for the average Chinese working person. If you’re going to try to make a good documentary, it’s all about evoking and understanding what a person’s going through on an emotional level.
Julia Reichert
The Chinese folks are really on a mission for the company to succeed, but also for their country to succeed. The Americans felt no such sense of mission, except at the beginning when they were grateful for those jobs. People were very grateful for those jobs even at low pay, because they thought, “Look. It’s a startup. We’re going to sacrifice. It’s going to be a rough year, but then it’s going to get better.” Almost the opposite actually occurred.
Steve Bognar
The pay did not go up that much. It went up a little bit, but people were used to making $29 or $30 an hour when they worked at General Motors, and they could have a middle-class life. Maybe they never went to college, but they could afford a ranch home in Dayton, Ohio, and they could afford a car and could afford to send their kids to college. It was a decent life. In the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, even well into the ’80s, we had a booming middle class in Dayton, and it was multiracial — it wasn’t just white folks. We had a middle-class black community, too.
But when these industrial and manufacturing jobs started leaving, we lost ... NCR was a huge company in Dayton. Delco was a big company in Dayton. Then when the GM plant left, those companies left. When the GM plant left, it was a deeply, deeply felt blow to the town.
Alissa Wilkinson
So much of American Factory explores how our culture affects what we think we should get out of a job — what we’re looking for in our work. Everyone wants to get paid, of course. But what the Americans in the film are asking for from the experience is different from what the Chinese are looking for. It depends on what they’ve been conditioned to expect.
Steve Bognar
So true.
Alissa Wilkinson
And the clash of those cultures is a large part of the dramatic tension in the film.
Julia Reichert
Absolutely. The Americans were at times very offended by and felt a lack of respect from the Chinese supervisors. But once we learned more about Chinese culture, we realized it was not necessarily that the Chinese didn’t respect the Americans, but that they never say, “Good job.” The expectation in China is if the supervisor tells the worker to do something, the worker will just do it. It’s not a culture where people question authority very much.
But we’re a culture that very much questions authority. We want to know why. We want to be able to say, “Look, I have a better idea. Why do I have to do it that way?” That’s just not the Chinese way.
So there were many, many, many ways in which Americans interpreted the way the Chinese expected them to act as a lack of respect. More important than wages [to the American workers’ morale] was that sense of respect, a job where you’re treated fairly, where it’s safe, where the conditions of work are pretty decent.
Steve Bognar
Another thing that I think divided people: Our Chinese producers explained to us that appeals to patriotism or nationalism within a Chinese context are pretty common, in a lot of companies. The boss will say, “Okay, we’re going to work triple time or overtime this week because we’re doing it not just for this company, but for our entire country. We’re going to build China.”
We saw that while we were filming. Some of those direct appeals to the Chinese team are in the film.
But what that does is create an “us” and a “them.” It’s not one team in that factory; it becomes two teams, the Chinese team that has been charged with managing or “handling” the other team. So while you might have short-term gains or benefits from appealing to those feelings of the Chinese team members, you’re also building a divide, because you’re keeping them apart from the people they work side-by-side with.
Alissa Wilkinson
The film covers a volatile time in America, from 2015 to 2017, when a lot changed, including our relationship with China. And the Obamas are releasing it as the first film in their Netflix slate. But it’s also a strikingly apolitical film. There’s a point of view, but I don’t think most viewers will find it easy to stamp one specific political lens onto it. Were you trying to steer clear of politics?
Julia Reichert
We started with our hearts, with the blue-collar workers. But then, as Steve said, we began to get to know some of the Chinese workers. Going to China was absolutely revelatory in terms of understanding the customs and ways of thinking about work life in China. In the editing room, we really, really made a point of bringing out the different points of view in a respectful way. I hope we succeeded.
I think that’s why President Obama and the first lady wanted to choose our film to be their first release. The name of their company is Higher Ground. They want to take the higher ground. They want to embrace books, movies, television that take the higher ground, that don’t have an axe to grind, and that aren’t polemical, or don’t take a political side. We tried really hard to do that, and I think they honored that.
Also, the president and Mrs. Obama are both from humble beginnings. She’s from a working-class family, and he’s certainly not from any kind of wealth. So they like telling stories of everyday people. That’s another thing that not just this film, but pretty much all the work that Steve and I, or I before that, have done: Make the protagonist of the story just regular folks. Not celebrities. We’ve never done that kind of film.
Steve Bognar
You know, Alissa, this is Julia’s 50th year as a documentary filmmaker. She’s got this amazing legacy of telling stories of working people and women, and non-celebrities, stories that really explore the impact of class on a person’s life.
We had a brilliant editor, Lindsay Utz, who we worked with super closely across 18 months of editing this film. We would often have conversations in the editing room about if we would include this scene or if we needed another scene to balance it out. Or if we include this line or this statement, or if we need another one. We had the responsibility of telling a good story, but we were also striving to thread a certain needle, to create a film in which all voices were included and that would be less polarizing than the times in which we live.
Julia Reichert
Yeah, it’s a very, very polarized time. We wanted to make a film that everyone watching it — whether they were an owner or management or blue collar — would feel it was fair.
Steve Bognar
That they could hear their voice in it.
Julia Reichert
Yeah, and I think that’s what we’ve done.
Steve Bognar
Well, we hope so. We’ll see very soon.
Alissa Wilkinson
Maybe one of the benefits of American Factory being released on Netflix is that people who might not have gone to the theater for a documentary about manufacturing — or maybe it wouldn’t have played in a theater near them at all — will watch it at home and discover they like it.
Julia Reichert
It’s kind of staggering that the film is going to be seen all around the world. I think it’s being translated into 20-some languages —
Steve Bognar
28!
Julia Reichert
Chinese businesses and the Chinese government have footholds in many parts of the world — all throughout Africa, some in South America, in Afghanistan, Middle Eastern countries, in Pakistan. The Chinese are present there. I think people are going to find it interesting to see how globalization played out in America while they’re watching it play out in their own country.
Steve Bognar
But if you had told us at the beginning of the filmmaking, when we first walked into that huge empty factory, that pretty soon we’d find ourselves filming little dancing chickens on a stage in China, we wouldn’t have believed you. The rides that this film have taken us on have been head-spinning.
Julia Reichert
It is going to play in theaters, though.
Steve Bognar
Well, that’s true. We’re very proud to be with Netflix, but it’s also playing theatrically in New York, LA, San Francisco, London, Toronto, Washington, DC, and good old Dayton, Ohio, a town from which we’re very proud to be — especially now, given that our town is still recovering from this terrible mass shooting that just happened.
Julia Reichert
All of it has been a big story here. There’s been about 8,000 people who work, or used to work, at that plant, both white-collar and blue-collar people. You see more Chinese folks now, too. Chinese kids who don’t speak English are going to the public schools.
Steve Bognar
We have better Chinese restaurants now than ever.
Julia Reichert
Oh my gosh, way better.
Steve Bognar
We also get to order off the Chinese menu, not the Americanized menu!
Alissa Wilkinson
You’ve spent so much time around this story, more than most journalists would ever be able to. Now that you’ve gotten to the end of making the film, do you think there’s a solution to the challenges posed by globalization? Or is this tension between cultures always going to be part of a globalized future? Are there things that communities around America and managers in this situation can do to improve conditions for their workers and for manufacturing in general?
Julia Reichert
We didn’t make the film to offer solutions. But I think some of the questions it raises are big questions for our country — for the world, really. It would have gone better if the Fuyao company had invested more money and resources into cultural training, into really having people who are now management and supervisors understand our laws and our customs. That would have helped things go better. Culture runs very deep, and it takes time to reorient folks when they’re in a new culture. The negative friction between Chinese management and American workers could have been avoided.
When the Chinese folks appeal to their workforce by saying, “Look, we’re better than them,” that is not going to go well. You see that in the film. They say, “You have to treat Americans kind of like junkies.” That should not have happened. They should have been encouraged to understand one another across cultures. Workers did that on their own, on the factory floor, as you see — inviting each other over for dinner and so forth.
But I think the questions of automation, of globalization — where you see different cultures having to mingle — I think those are questions for our country. What kind of country do we want to have? Do we want to have a country where the working folks’ wages are really stagnant while the billionaire class grows and grows? Is that the kind of country we want to have? Do we want to have a country where automation throws people out of work?
Or do we want to have a country where we think about that together, with companies, corporations at the table, with government at the table, and with workers at the table with their collective voice, to think together about what’s going to be our future with automation, globalization, AI, and so forth?
These should not be scary things. We should think, “This is what’s happening in the world. How are we going to make that work for everyone?” It may sound Pollyanna-ish to say that. But on the other hand, what kind of world do we want, as citizens?
We’ve been impressed that people come up to us after screenings who are from business schools, who are from law schools, who are on both sides — labor and management. People say, “We have to show this film to our students, because they need to know what’s going on.”
Steve Bognar
And then union folks come up to us, and say, “We want to show it in our union hall.” We feel really lucky.
Julia Reichert
It raises so many questions.
Steve Bognar
And crosses borders.
American Factory is streaming on Netflix and playing in theaters in select cities.