As we dash headlong into the age of the globalization and consolidation of the world economy, we run into many questions that we are not able to answer immediately or sufficiently. How do industrial workers in first world countries compete with their counterparts in the third world, who are willing to work for a small percentage of the pay? In the documentary Outsourcing Greenville, we are shown the consequences of what can happen to a community when the time isn’t taken to answer such questions.
In March of 2006, the last refrigerator rolled off the assembly line of the 100 year old Electrolux manufacturing plant in Greenville, Michigan. The plant closed that month, robbing the small, blue collar town of its biggest employer. The closure put 25 percent of the town’s population of 2,700 people out of work overnight. The central focus of the short documentary this closure affected is on the people of Greenville, victims of globalization as Electrolux moved its manufacturing to Mexico, where abundant cheap labor is available and workers can be paid as low as $1.57 per hour.
The closure came at a time when Electrolux was experiencing solid annual profits. But that didn’t stop them from closing what had previously been the largest refrigerator plant in the world. “I’ve been working here for 22 years,” says a worker as she struggles to hold back tears. “I’ve got nothing now.”
“I’m one of the lucky ones,” a woman laments. “My kids are raised. I’ve paid off a lot of things. A lot of my friends aren’t as lucky.”
The main point of the film is to argue against the business practices of companies who outsource their labor to the third world, leaving American employees, many of whom have been working for the company for years or decades, out of work with little to no benefits or compensation. While it is simply good business for a company to seek cheaper labor, allowing for a larger profit margin, it also hurts many people who have done nothing but give their best effort and tireless work to the same company that has thrown them by the wayside.
“When a company is profitable,” says one of the workers interviewed in the film, “and encouraged by trade agreements to leave, despite well over 100 million dollars in tax help, in union concessions, in help from the governor, being refused by that company, there just isn’t much we can do. That isn’t a level playing field.”
Also blamed in the film is the US government, which is hypothesized as having not done enough to protect US workers from the flight of capital to foreign markets. The film claims the government failed to establish tariffs and taxes aimed towards domestic companies that manufacture their goods in foreign countries, while they have also failed to provide sufficient incentives for those same companies to want to keep their operations on American shores.
The majority of the most effective material in the documentary is the testimony of the workers themselves. While also using news footage of the plant as well as old and more current ad campaigns for Electrolux refrigerators, much of the film is taken up by interviews with the workers who lost their jobs. Two of those workers in particular also function as the narrators, telling the stories of how they lost their jobs two weeks after being notified of such a dramatic change in their lives. This was how most of the employees of the plant were informed of the impending layoffs, and they talked about the rumors that flew amongst them as to whether or not it could possibly be true. The question was asked, “Could they really do that to us after all we’ve done for them?”
While the film makes no effort to interview anybody for Electrolux or to illuminate the other half of the story, one is left with the impression that even if they did, any argument that could be made against the main point of the film would be futile and would fall on deaf ears. The workers are shown as victims of both the globalization of our economy as well as business practices that shows little concern for anything but the bottom line on the quarterly earnings statement.
Zac Johnson - My name is Zac Johnson. I'm a 22 year old senior at Arizona State University in Tempe, majoring in political science. I'll graduate in ...
