Chinese-Owned Factory in Ohio Fights Off Unionization Plan<br />“The less sophisticated and more ‘green’ Chinese investors don’t really understand local dynamics at all,”<br />said Damien Ma, a fellow at the Paulson Institute who follows Chinese investment in the United States.<br />“While we respect our employees’ right to support or reject a union, we also admire<br />their courage to reject this union’s desperate attempt to prop up its revenue.”<br />In conceding the result, the United Automobile Workers union, which had been organizing the workers since<br />2015, said it was considering filing objections with the federal labor board over the company’s behavior.<br />Mary Gallagher, the director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, said in an interview this spring<br />that Chinese business owners often expect to order around their workers freely, while American workers usually expect to have input into how they perform their tasks.<br />A Chinese glassmaker beat back a unionization bid at a plant in Ohio on Thursday, winning a key victory in an important<br />test of the way Chinese companies handle employee relations as they increase their holdings in the United States.<br />“We are pleased that FGA associates chose to maintain a direct relationship with our<br />company,” said Jeff Daochuan Liu, president of Fuyao Glass America, in a statement.<br />“And so they either don’t care that much about labor conditions, or most likely, they just don’t really know but pulled the trigger anyway.”<br />Fuyao arguably fell into this category, having set up its factory in union-friendly Ohio.
