The original text is published in The Surging·Thought Market
The documentary "American Factory" once again aroused discussion about the Chinese-funded enterprise Fuyao and its founder Cao Dewang in the United States. In fact, before the advent of the documentary, Cao had been in the center of public opinion in the two countries many times because of his adventures, although the focus of attention on both sides was not consistent.
Cao Dewang's departure has triggered reflections on rising manufacturing costs on the mainland. Some people believe that he is a traitor who flees with capital during the economic downturn. The union blockade he suffered has caused some domestic public opinion to fear the US trade unions. In the imagination of the media, American labor unions seem to be a very powerful existence. They are shaped as interest groups that specialize in destroying enterprises. For Chinese companies going out, they are "obstacles to internationalization" (NetEase Research Bureau). : "Cao Dewang went to the United States to open a factory and stepped on the pit? How powerful is the American labor union" , June 16, 2017).
The U.S. media is concerned about whether this Chinese-owned factory can operate in compliance with U.S. laws-its constantly exposed safety hazards and environmental protection issues make people worry that this will introduce some bad business habits. In addition, the preference for adopting Chinese rather than local managers and disrespect for American employees is also an aspect of media attention. In Western public opinion, the formation of labor unions is regarded as a proactive action for workers to solve problems (New York Times: "Chinese factories meet American labor unions 》 , November 8, 2017).
The Chinese media undoubtedly have many misunderstandings about the American trade unions. Although, as State Senator Sherrod Brown pointed out in the film, Ohio is a place with a long history of unions, another head of the local city government is obviously more honest. He once said in an interview, Joining a union is already an "outdated tradition", and the influence of UAW is far less than that of decades ago. Not all Japanese companies and other Chinese companies that come to build factories there have established trade unions.
Affected by the neoliberal policies implemented by the Reagan administration, the coverage of union membership in the United States has declined sharply since 1980, and is currently only about 11%. If government employees are excluded, it is only 7% in the private sector. These figures are pitiful when compared with one-third of the total number of workers in the heyday of union members. The statistics on the number of strikes by more than 1,000 people in the United States also experienced a cliff-like decline in the 1980s, and this trough has continued to this day. Prior to this, the American trade union movement had experienced many peaks in the 1940s and 1950s, 1960s and 1970s after World War II.
In fact, apart from "American Factory," American filmmakers have left a series of images in history that record the state of the labor movement during the same period. These representative images of workers will help us better understand how the process of union decline has unfolded gradually. Without an understanding of the history of the evolution of American union politics, we would not be able to understand the status quo of union politics presented in "American Factory", and thus we have fallen into misunderstanding.
The movie "Fire Front" (1987) presents an important historical event that occurred in the 1920s-the Battle of Matwan. The protagonist in the movie is a miner worker in Mingo County, West Virginia. They went on strike to protest low wages and forced consumption by the company. Then, under the leadership of union organizers from UMWA, whites, blacks and Italian immigrants joined forces to form a unified union. But the private forces hired by mining companies (Baldwin Felt Detective Agency) have been trying to disrupt and disrupt their work. This film reflects the efforts of workers in that era to fight for the unionization of the labor movement. This battle led to the Battle of Blair Mountain more than a month later. Zhang Yueran mentioned the latter battle in the article "The American Workers' Movement and the Sino-US Trade War", which was called by many historians "the largest internal armed conflict after the American Civil War." Approximately 10,000 miners participated in the armed struggle against the military and police and the militia hired by their employers. In the end, the president directly ordered that the army forcibly intervened to suppress the strike, and blood flowed for a while.
However, it was not until 1935 that the U.S. government passed the National Labor Relations Act (National Labor Relations Act) in the face of the rising labor movement in the context of the Great Depression, which legally recognized the right of workers to organize trade unions and workers’ rights. Collective bargaining rights and workers’ right to strike—generally referred to as the "three labor rights". The documentary "Brothers on the Line" (Brothers on the Line, 2009) shows the background of the establishment of a large number of American labor unions during that period. The protagonist of the trade union we visited is the three brothers Luther, the original founder of the trade union. They were all German immigrants and actively participated in the strikes against GM and Ford during that period and forced them to sign union contracts. UAW actively increased the wages of workers in the automotive industry and strived for a complete welfare system. It later developed into the largest single union in the United States. At its peak, it had more than 1.5 million members, although it has now shrunk to more than 300,000 due to the shrinking of the automotive industry. These achievements even made the Luther brothers known as the forgers of the American middle class. It is the trade union movement marked by UAW that gradually raised the living standards of a large number of American working classes to a relatively affluent level to support their American dream of owning houses, cars and stabilizing family life.
But the national labor relations law promoted by Roosevelt also brought some troubles. For example, Zhang Yueran believes that this labor law stipulates that "workers must vote and more than half of the workers agree to form a trade union", which provides enough space for American companies to obstruct and oppose the establishment of trade unions. This is the legal basis for the voting process recorded in "American Factory". More importantly, the setting of voting makes it easy for workers to have the illusion of choosing between employers and unions, making them forget that the union should be the worker's own organization, not a third party outside the enterprise. The union has not tried to change this rule. During the presidency of President Obama, several major unions closely linked to the Democratic Party actively promoted the "Employee Free Choice Act", which means that more than half of the employees of enterprises can form a union by signing an authorization card. The irony is that Obama did not bother to support this bill, but many years later he participated in the later release of this documentary focusing on labor issues, and even became the "spokesperson" of this film in the media. Another problem It was this law that allowed then President Roosevelt to form a political alliance with the labor movement, and in the future promoted the union to gradually become the Democratic Party’s electoral machine. The Democratic Party promised to convey benefits to the union after the election, and the union sent votes to the Democratic Party. As a result, trade unions have not only lost their political independence, but also become increasingly bureaucratic and even become corrupt, gradually losing their representation at the grassroots level. Many workers today lack trust in trade unions, which is a big reason.
Even Roosevelt's "favor" was still temporary. In response to the largest strike wave in American history after World War II, the United States introduced the Labor-Management Relations Act (Labor-Management Relations Act, also known as the Taft-Hartley Act) in 1947 to replace Roosevelt’s labor relations law. To a large extent, the workers’ right to organize the trade union was taken back. This bill is undoubtedly a product of the Cold War environment, and even contains a McCarthyist-style purge of union staff. It had a huge impact on the labor union movement in the United States. The classic American left-wing film "The Backbone of Society" (1954) reflects this change. In the film, in order to protest the dangerous working environment with frequent accidents, the miners voted to form a union, go on strike and establish strike pickets. However, the promulgation of the Taft-Hartley Act led to a sharp turnaround in the situation. Workers who went on strike lost legal protection and were arrested. The wives of the miners were originally housewives, and now they have to replace their husbands to defend the picket line, because they are not employees of the mining company and will not be punished by this bill. In the course of the struggle for the unity of the workers, the women's sense of independence gradually awakened and won the respect of the male workers. Although in the film, the strike was finally victorious, we return to reality but can find the weakness of the trade union movement. But it is undeniable that the film is highly predictable and highlights the power of women and minority workers. And these forces were one of the main reasons that prompted the labor movement to move towards a short-lived revival in the 1960s and 1970s.
By the 1970s, the female director Barbara Cooper's "Harlan County, USA" (1976) was considered one of the greatest documentaries in film history. In this film reflecting the strike of American miners, black miners and female miners together became the backbone of the entire strike. In the latter part of the one-year strike, the solidarity teams from other states reflected the civil environment in the United States that pursued equal emancipation in the 1970s. The film also recorded corruption among the union's senior leaders. Boyle, the former UMW union chairman, colluded with the interests of coal mine owners to continue to suppress workers at the expense of murdering rivals. (This situation is even more exaggerated in another film of the same time, "The Blue Collar Class" (1978). The film tells the story of an absurd homicide related to labor unions in the 1970s. Difficulties decided to go to the union headquarters to rob, but found information about the union’s illegal loan business and collusion with criminal groups, so he tried to blackmail the union and was retaliated by the union leader.)
If we notice the words of the worker who passed through the workshop propaganda union in "American Factory", we will find the name of an actress he mentioned: Sally Field (Sally Field). The actress became the Queen of the Cannes Film Festival because of her starring role as a female worker in "Norma Rae" (1979). In this film adapted from real people, the female worker played by Field carries a cardboard with the word "UNION" (UNION) through a cotton mill workshop in a small town in the south, and finally leads to the establishment of the union. But the 21st century workers seem to be not as lucky as Norma Lei.
Beginning in the 1980s, Reagan used forceful means like Thatcher to suppress the labor and trade union movement, and the alternation of bipartisan politics did not change the essentially continuing neoliberal policy. Zhang Yueran pointed out that the factors that contributed to the political decline of trade unions also included the tremendous changes in the industrial structure of the United States during this period. The proportion of manufacturing industry workers in the employed population has been declining year by year, and service workers have gradually risen, which makes the old organization of the labor movement face adjustments. On the other hand, the international industrial transfer in the process of capitalist globalization has also made the United States gradually de-industrialized. Even some of the remaining manufacturing industries tend to be transferred to anti-union unions and passed right-to-work laws. Prevent workers from joining unions in the southern United States. This has led to the gradual transformation of traditional industrial areas in the northeastern United States into "rust areas."
When Barbara Cooper picked up the camera again in the 1990s to focus on union politics in the United States, she could only shoot a documentary reflecting the failure of the workers' strike. The documentary "American Dream" (1990) shares some similar themes with "American Factory", such as the decline of the American middle class, but it has a clearer stand. It attributed the loss of income and homes of workers' families to Reagan's neoliberal economics. In the documentary, a meat processing factory reduces labor costs by cutting wages, cutting benefits, outsourcing (flexible labor) and alternative employment. The local union P-9 protested the strike, but its request did not receive the support of the industry's national union union. In the end, nearly 80% (more than 700) workers were fired.
In fact, in "American Factory", we saw that the jobs provided by Fresh Capital could not return workers to their former middle-class positions, and the attempt to establish unions was stifled in the bud. This shows that workers have to be trapped at a lower income level. Complementing Trump's policy of attracting the return of manufacturing industries, trade protection policies are also difficult to boost manufacturing employment to the original level. Take Ohio with the rust belt as an example. When the United States imposed steel tariffs in March last year, the number of manufacturing jobs in Ohio was 695,800, which rose slightly to 705,700 in December last year. Sociologist Bulowie proposed in the 1970s that in developed capitalist countries, "identity" factory politics had replaced "compulsive" factory politics, and capitalist production was maintained through the consent of manufacturing workers to the production process. After that, Blowey put it into a more macroscopic social structure, calling it the "hegemony" in factory politics. However, history may have to prove that the so-called “hegemonic” factory politics characterized by a welfare system and a large-scale middle class is just a short-lived and unsustainable. Not only the American dream, but also the development vision of various countries based on the American dream will all be in vain in the bankruptcy of globalization. And when we look back at the century-old history of union politics in the United States, its decline also means the failure of reformist unions that are moving towards institutionalization. The experience and lessons of this are worthy of careful summary and analysis.
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