Documentary Can Reflect the Complexities of Working-Class Life

Documentary storytelling has the power to destabilize polarization by elevating a spectrum of voices and introducing audiences to other, otherwise silenced, perspectives, writes Elizabeth Faue, a professor of history and department chair at Wayne State University, where she has taught labor history for 30 years. As the daughter and granddaughter of unionists and as author of Rethinking the American Labor Movement (2017), she has given priority to the telling of working-class stories. Here she addresses Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert’s Oscar-winning film, American Factory (2019).

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American Factory offers the opportunity to consider the power of storytelling, and especially documentaries, to bridge political divides, provoke national conversations, and restore common ground. The film shows us several working-class, managerial, and company stories of the efforts to bring a Fuyao Glass America plant, the largest automotive windshield maker in the world, into production and profitability.

Not surprisingly, the stories do not add up to a single narrative. Indeed, one of the goals of director-producers Bognar and Reichert was to avoid imposing their choices on the film’s arc. Their choice of subject nevertheless frames the film in myriad ways, first of all by beginning where their short film, The Last Truck (2009), left off, with the closing of the GM plant in Dayton, Ohio. That factory, converted to automotive glass, is now the American Factory of the title, its desolate landscape improved by a new company and more than a thousand jobs. Fairly quickly, though, the conflict between the firm’s and the workers’ goals emerges. The ghost of the factory’s union, the venerable United Auto Workers, plays its part in a failed union drive. By 2018, replacement managers and executives, most of them Chinese, are introducing new robotic machines, even with more than 2,000 American workers on the payroll.

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  Julia Reichert’s American Factory, 2019. Image courtesy Netflix
  
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  Julia Reichert’s American Factory, 2019. Image courtesy Netflix
  
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  Julia Reichert’s American Factory, 2019. Image courtesy Netflix
  

As with much of Reichert’s earlier work, the strength of the film is in its interviews with workers on the ground. Their stories show how workers and managers inhabit a world of fragmentation, in which there is no single working-class tale nor even a unified story among those who manage and own the factory. The demands of global capital splinter loyalties and alienate even some managers. The film’s window into this fragmentation admits only a partial view. We do not get to see much into the world beyond the factory. Opening up sight lines into the community of Dayton would perhaps better contextualize stories the filmmakers seek to tell.

The role of the labor historian is like that of the labor documentarian. We seek to make more visible and accessible the stories of those who have been left aside. Reichert’s 50-year history of producing documentaries about the working class, including the iconic Union Maids (1976), has made my work easier.

It is possible to imagine and evoke the landscape of workers’ experience through the visual and oral testimony in these films and to familiarize students with a labor movement that often flies below the radar of even social media, let alone broadcast and cable networks. The teachers’ strikes in the past year have broken through the silence, but the main issue is whether audiences are willing to listen and to act on what they learn. A BBC story last month noted that American Factory has sparked considerable debate in China not about American values but about its own. I have my doubts about whether politicians, managers, or stockholders in the United States can hear these stories. Where American Factory and other labor documentaries can have an impact is among those who seek to understand our moment in global history and how we might change its future—not exactly preaching to the choir, but at least speaking to those who might sing.

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