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If one is interested in Chinese bossing around other races, American Factory (2019). But if it is Africans one is after, Africa Addio (1966) provides rare depictions of genocides and atrocities forgotten.
I hated American Factory. They could have made a decent documentary, but instead made a profoundly stupid circlejerk.
This town is completely devastated because of the loss of manufacturing jobs. Factory starts up and offers decent pay, but not as good as before when labour was worth a premium because it was scarce. People still have financial trouble because of debt/medical issues. Somehow this is the factory's fault. Very unironic Cophenhagen ethics. We'll mention that the factory cost billions of dollars that have yet to be paid off and is operating at a loss every month once and somehow never actually internalize what that means. They are just greedy businessmen that aren't paying the workers what they are worth.
They intersperse interviews with mainland China workers that have conditions 10x worse than the American ones, but have zero empathy for their plight. Chinese guy talks about how he has worked 996 and never seen his family for 5 years. American guy complaining that he only gets $25 an hour. American guy talking about how they only get an 8 minute break every hour out of some really hot place in a factory, cut to Chinese guy saying they have 12 hour shifts in the hot area where they aren't allowed to leave at all.
They start getting into the union organizing/busting bit. They paid these consultants $200k to come in and do some union busting. It would have cost less to give everyone that worked there $.50 more an hour for a single month. No, I don't understand the difference between a one-time cost and increasing a recurring cost like labour. I will repeat this same argument ten times throughout the movie because I clearly think it is a slamdunk.
They actually give everyone modest pay raises and other concessions that people were pushing for ahead of the union vote. This clearly means they are evil because what the workers truly need is not better conditions and pay, but a union.
It is really awful because you could have taken what they had and made a good movie, but instead made something that only appeals to someone that already agrees with all of their positions. Hell, I'm on board with 90% of what they want and hated it still.
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American Factory was seriously depressing as an American. You’re confronted with the fact that our ill health spells ruin for our future. These American workers simply can’t do what the Chinese can do in terms of productivity, they have been made fat and slow from the American diet poisoning them over decades.
I'm not especially convinced that there's that much of a shortage of Americans who want to work dogmatically hard.
I'm just not sure American culture filters those people to glass factories in Dayton, OH.
In America those people tend to get filtered into industries like Tech, Finance, Medicine, Law, Entertainment, Sports.
Comparative advantage being what it is, glass manufacturing appears to be something to aspire to a bit more in China than it is in America, shrug, so it goes.
Within a couple days of watching American Factory I watched a short 20 or so minute documentary about various supply chains in China, after failing to find it in half hour or so of internet searching I've given up, but most of the factories were of cheap plastic trinkets, the pace of work seemed pretty comparable to the Americans in Dayton.
Even in China, I imagine there are hierarchies of where people are motivated to work, and which places attract the motivated workers, they're just different than they are here.
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I wish it didn’t have cringe parts like white South African kids jumping on a tramboline for five minutes with commentary one level below third reich propaganda movies. Its recordings of how decolonisation happened on the ground is just incredible. Totally unmatched. Also the recordings of the genocide are the most harrowing moments I have ever seen on film. For the uninitiated, they fly over a couple thousand disposed Arabs running for their lives one day and when they return with their helicopter the next time, it’s just corpses. A lot of corpses.
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