Rachel Hayslip Pauline Cullen Film Analysis 10/10/01 The social phenomenon in Flint, Michigan is that General Motors turned its hometown into a ghost town. Thousands of workers lost their jobs due to capitalism. General Motors felt that being the number two leading company in the United States was not good enough for them. Roger Smith felt that since he was a bourgeoisie than he could control the workers of the plant. By controlling them he was able to destroy many lives. He had the ability to hire and fire people at random. He fired people although his company was at top-notch everyday and still going strong.
GM led to close these factories so capitalism for the company would grow. They wanted to compete with the other leading industries of the world not just the nation. The bourgeoisie of GM wanted to use there profits not to create jobs, but to buy data processing companies and weapons manufacturers, automate their assemble lines, and build new plants in Mexico and Asia.
English: The recently renovated historic First Nat...
Flint's 235-acre complex known as Buick City was i...
Flint Hill, VirginiaIn addition to the Power they had, they bought out companies such as Isuzu and entered a joint operation with Toyota.
All of this sudden change in Flint caused conflict with every resident of the town. Although the town was loosely integrated, businesses depended on other businesses. If a big social change comes about then it becomes a struggle for power and scarce resources. The layoff in turn caused the economy of flint to go under. Many people had no money, which then in turn prevents them from buying sources. Which causes an effect of companies going out of business. People lost their homes and their dignity. Many people lost jobs at other businesses other than GM. They lost heir jobs because they were not making a profit in Flint so many stores went up and left. Not only were jobs lost but crime rate was at its highest in Flint. They feel it was like that because of the sudden drop in employment. So not only the employers of GM were affected but also the society as a whole was.
It will take Flint a long time to have the society back to where it was. It could never return to what it once was. The economy will never be as large as it once was without GM there, unless another large business will be willing to take the chance of locating there. The social struggle in the town is larger than before. There is no large business that dominates over them, they are the only the proletariats of the town. Which then cause more conflict between the citizens of the society.
Many of the citizens saw this as a power trip that GM was going on and they were forced to stand by and watch. Many people saw the standard American dream destroyed. The dream promised that if you worked hard and the company prospered, you would too. It now seems, GM has changed the rules: you work hard, the company prospers and you loser your job. GM wanted to stay competitive in society. They say that they started an industrialization revolution. Again this shows the main groups of society only caring about capitalism and being a domination power source.
As you can see here having power can cause huge problems, but also being just a worker can too. People in this world are competing with one another every day of their lives. There will always be those people in society that feel the need to dominate over others. In this case it showed that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. It shows that every human being has different values that they see fit within different social groups. If you are the rich group than they saw it as that those unemployed people were lazy. If you were the poor you saw it as the rich were taking from the poor. Although the poor let the bourgeoisies dominate over them. After all societies are like that causing there always to be conflict between one another.
Flint, New York