So before I started my new job, I watched American Factory on Netflix, just to get myself in the mindset for the working world (i.e. becoming a corporate drone again, as opposed to a stay-at-home slob*). It was more objective than most documentaries I see. (I kinda got soured on them because I’ve seen so many that have a point they want to reach, then manipulate what you see to prove that point.)
But this one shows the good and the bad of an American glass factory bought and run by a Chinese CEO. They call him the “chairman” and he comes in and asks for a $35,000 garage door because it’s “facing the wrong way”, and then says a fire alarm should be moved higher, ignorant of the strict regulations about fire safety in buildings.
There’s TVs in the breakroom showing happy Chinese children but the three microwaves are broken. So yeah, there’s expected culture clash. The best part is when the American executives go to China for the company’s anniversary celebration and there are elaborate skits and dances and elementary school children “honoring the company” with lines like this:
Come on! Two words have become really popular recently. What are the words? Intelligence. Lean. Intelligent and lean manufacturing. All industries should adopt them.
Finance, service, manufacturing / Intelligent and lean manufacturing / Technology is developing rapidly / The information age has already arrived / Employee relations system is amazing
Great at resource integration / And market response / Waste eliminated / And revenues generated / Transition, upgrade / Promotion, integration / A corporation with lean manufacturing / Fuyao is creating a new future!
Weird.
But I didn’t come here to talk about that today. I came to talk about unions. The big crux of the documentary’s plot stems from whether the workers vote to unionize.
And what I’ve learned is that management hates unions for purely selfish reasons. They say unions cut into efficiency, cut into the bottom line. It’s because unions bring power to the people. Unions let people organize into crowds that can’t be ignored. Unions mean management has less power to cut wages, cut insurance, remove niceties, push workers closer to the “indentured servant” end of the spectrum than “respected wage earner”. Unions have every advantage to the worker and none to the management, and that’s why management hates them.
This wouldn’t be a problem if management sympathized with the worker, but they don’t. They don’t see them as a human being, they see them as a commodity. A robot in a factory. Not as someone with a family to feed, a friend, a student working off loans, a son with a sick mother. I see it every day at my job, especially in the business presentations and company meetings. They talk about stuff that happens at the top–new people you don’t know, new offices they built that they’re “very excited about”, conferences for executives and clients and how happy they were with the product. It’s all cheerleading and rhetoric meant to “motivate” and none of it has to do with my job. How does being “optimistic about first quarter’s results” or “increasing our NPS score” help me program better?
So over the movie, management tries various things to stop the workers from unionizing. They mostly fire workers who are pro-union, coming up with bullshit excuses like “you were two minutes slower on the computer than usual”. They put spies/moles on the factory floor. The best is the forced meetings where some consultant tells you why unions are bad. I love this line in particular…
“The contract that you get, if you get one, might include better wages and benefits. That contract might include the same wages and benefits you have today. And that contract, finally, might include less wages and less benefits.”
I’m like, “yep, those are the three options. Pretty much covered it.” Like, what else is there? I guess you might have to start paying them to work, but that seems unlikely.
And couldn’t those three outcomes happen regardless of a union? In the movie, management complains that workers ask for too much. That companies will be forced to layoff workers if wages go too high. Well, it’s hard to sympathize when the executives keep getting salary bonuses and pay raises. Or when the company hosts a billion dollar anniversary show with elementary school kids singing in daisy costumes.
Anyone with half a brain can see that management doesn’t have a leg to stand on. So they scare-monger. For a worker, there is every advantage to join a union and none not to. Companies are not a democracy–they are a dictatorship. The worst kind of Big Brother tyranny.
Without unity, workers are forced to abide by management’s whims. They can fire someone without reasonable cause. They can ignore basic comforts, like working microwaves. They can force overtime, working on the weekends, working while sick, working in poor weather, working in unsafe conditions, working while underage.
Companies do not have your best interest in mind. They’re thinking about the bottom line. They’re thinking about that number at the end of the budget analysis every quarter. They don’t care that some things can’t be calculated.
I don’t understand why any hourly wageworker wouldn’t be pro-union. There’s way more to gain than to lose. The most management can do is take away your job, and there’s always work somewhere. All of management’s reasons to be anti-union are rooted in selfishness and profit. If they sided with workers, we wouldn’t have this problem. But they’re not, so we need unions to give the worker some power over the cigar-chomping fat cat at the top floor.
*Just because it’s funny, here’s a gross story to illustrate how much of a slob I was. So I usually sleep on my side, one arm under my pillow. But recently the place where I put my head smelled like B.O. and I couldn’t figure out why. Was it something wafting up from under the sheets? Was it because of where I sit up and read? I even washed the sheets and it was back a day later. Then I realized it was because I had stopped wearing deodorant. And my armpit was rubbing into that area, right where my head and nose is. So I was saturating the bed with my own armpit funk.
