The film Gung-Ho opens with a group of managers for a Japanese manufacturing firm screaming while covered in ribbons that state their “crimes” as part of their training in shame for their poor performance. This is then quickly contrasted by a blithe Michael Keaton, who plays the role of a foreman at a now-closed automobile manufacturing plant that has been selected by his former co-workers to pitch the directors of the aforementioned Japanese firm on the benefits of choosing their town as the next site from which to manufacture their brand of cars. Throughout Gung-Ho, directed by Ron Howard, this cultural and economic friction that exists between the diligent-in-their-work but socially repressed Japanese management and the languid but happy Americans workers manifests itself in a number of other forms. As it’s depicted in the film, both must adapt to each other to become fully humanized.
Were Japanese managers to actually come to America they would likely be influenced by the thought of Eiichi Shibusawa (1840-1931), the Meiji statesman turned business leader, that posed a number of fundamental questions regarding the relationship between business enterprises and a “national purpose”, between business needs and individual ethics. While he’s not mentioned in the film, this seems to be suggested given the corporatist behavior of the Japanese. They quickly come to be viewed not as the saviors hoped for, but over-bearing task-masters. They reassign many people to different positions following the plants re-opening. They install video-cameras to monitor employees on the production line, make morning exercises mandatory, limit the amount of time one can spend on the bathroom, prohibit employees from leaving to spend time with wives that are having labor or children that have just had surgery and apply zero-defect quality and standardization models that are resisted by the Americans.
The Americans, for their part, seem intent on simply repeating the quality and quantity of work that they did with their previous employer only until they come to realize that their great hope in the factory starting up might soon be short-lived. After the narrative has been established in the conflict between these two group, the plot develops in such a way that the American workers must either match the Japanese production numbers – 15,000 cars in one month – or the plant will again be closed. While there are a number of protests by the workers against the management in the film about these changed conditions, in the end they unite behind Michael Keaton’s character as they recognize that if they don’t then they will again lose their jobs. BY the film’s end all of the workers on strike end up crossing the line to work so that they can meet this production number and thus continue to work.
I believe that Gung-Ho ought to be paired viewing with a recently released comedy that addresses issues of workplace culture, how adaptation of the desired traits of employers leads to upward mobility and how capitalism turns submission to those with money to an economic necessity – Sorry to Bother You.
While the films are poles apart in their over-arching messaging, the narrative of Gung-Ho indicates that only through greater submission to the will of the employer the individual can find financial stability and thus happiness whereas Sorry to Bother You indicates that this can only happen through collective workplace action via unions that is further connected to the overthrowing of the capitalist order via a radical leftist action, the thematic elements are similar even if the conclusions are the opposite. Unlike Gung-Ho, Sorry to Bother You depicts wage-labor not as a source for pride and identity, but as alienating, dehumanizing and a system to be overcome rather than bought in to.