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Enlarge this image Chinese workers at Fuyao Glass America attend training to learn about American culture. Courtesy of Netflix In 2008, GM closed its manufacturing plant in Dayton, Ohio, sending the community into a tailspin. Workers who had been unionized at GM struggled to find jobs that paid close to the wages the plant had paid. "After that GM plant closed, things were so hard for so long," Ohio-based filmmaker Steven Bognar says. "People lost their homes. The jobs you could get were at the Kohl's distribution center or Payless Shoes warehouse distribution center or fast food. People were making $9 an hour." When the Chinese glass manufacturer Fuyao reopened the shuttered GM plant in 2016, the community welcomed the influx of new jobs. But as time went on, enthusiasm waned. Some former GM employees found themselves working longer hours at Fuyao for half the pay. In the Oscar-nominated documentary, American Factory, Bognar and Julia Reichert capture the tensions that exist within the Chinese-owned, Ohio-based plant. This is Reichert's fourth Oscar nomination — her first was in 1978. "In the United States, we fought to have an eight-hour day and have weekends off," she says. "That's pretty much unheard of in industrial work in China. ... If the boss says you have to work six days a week or seven days a week you just do it." Bognar describes the relationship between the company and its American employees as a "complicated" one. People are grateful for the jobs, but the work is tough — especially on the factory floor: "It's hard, it's hot, it's dangerous, and the expectations are very high," he says. "And yet the pay is not what it should be." American Factory won last year's Sundance Award for Directing of a U.S. Documentary. It was the first acquisition for Barack and Michelle Obama's production company, Higher Ground, and is streaming on Netflix. Interview highlights On the difference between wages at the unionized GM plant and at Fuyao Bognar: In the film, Shawnea Rosser, who worked at the old GM plant and now works at Fuyao, she says it varies directly. She says at GM she was making $29 and some cents per hour and at Fuyao she makes $12.84. So that's less than half of what she used to make. She has several children. ... They lost their house because they couldn't they couldn't make the mortgage payments after GM closed. It's a very different world. Here's the crazy thing: In China, it's been a remarkable trajectory. China's on the rise and [so are] people in the film, like Wong He. He is the furnace engineer who has been sent from China to the U.S. He's here for at least two years. He's not going to see his children for two years. But he's been working at Fuyao since he was 19 years old. He is so dedicated to Fuyao, and it's offering him a path to the middle class. He told us he's going to b
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