I posted the following paragraphs hoping they could be soothing for the FTs in China: Take heart, the Chinese owners and managers, in their own plants in America, treat their American workers as bad as the Chinese school owners in China treat their FTs. It's in the DNA.

At Fuyao, a major culture clash is playing out on the factory floor, with some workers questioning the company’s commitment to operating under American supervision and American norms. Fuyao faces an acrimonious union campaign by the United Automobile Workers and a lawsuit by a former manager who says he was let go in part because he is not Chinese.


Fred Strahorn, the Democratic minority leader of the Ohio House of Representatives, told the audience that Fuyao’s operation felt like “a little bit of a hostage situation” and pledged to “show Fuyao that we do things a little bit different in Dayton, Ohio.”


Other workers said that despite the company’s insistence that it wanted to hand the plant over to American managers, it had increased the proportion of Chinese supervisors in recent months.


“Since those two have been fired, it has more of a Chinese feel than what it was before,” said Duane Young, a worker at the plant. He said the Chinese had little interest in training, sharing responsibility with or even engaging with American employees.

In an interview in Beijing, Mr. Cao said he had replaced Mr. Burrows and Mr. Gauthier because “they didn’t do their jobs but squandered my money.” He lamented that productivity at the plant “is not as high as we have in China,” adding that “some of the workers are just idling around.”


To some extent, cultural norms may explain the tensions.


Mary Gallagher, who directs the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, said [in China] entrepreneurs like Mr. Cao often populate their factories with migrants from rural areas, whom they expect to be relatively submissive, unlike American workers, who expect a more collegial management style. “He hasn’t ever had probably this type of pressure from a work force,” she said.


Workers at the Fuyao plant say Chinese managers seem to elevate production goals above all else. When employees have trouble with equipment and ask to shut it down, said Nicholas Tannenbaum, a Fuyao worker who was fired in late May, “the Chinese look at us and say, ‘No need.’”


But Weiyi Shi, a professor of political economy at the University of California, San Diego, said Chinese overseas investments in Africa and Asia showed a pattern of reluctance to transfer operations to local control. “At the managerial level, you see that the technical staff tends to be from China,” she said. “The one local employee they hire at a senior managerial level would be the human resources director.”