You might also enjoy this podcast (sorry, not a film) about another hard-hit American town: http://www.npr.org/2017/02/06/513713606/glass-house-chronicles-the-sharp-decline-of-an-all-american-factory-town. We own some Anchor-Hocking glass storage bowls (glass version of Tupperware).
More and more, thinkers are beginning to question the wisdom of giving so much power to the financial classes. As more and more of a nation's wealth is absorbed into financial circles, it raises the question, what good is it doing the rest of us? I've said it before in these pages, and it is not an original thought by any means, once we start to behave as if we are all here as a support system for the moneyed classes, rather than viewing commerce as a just another cultural tool to be used for our benefit, then we've lost. And the sad thing is that there really seems to be a lot of people who believe that the commercial classes are NOT beholden to the surrounding culture. They have made the magical and illogical leap, seemingly unaware that they have done so, from "sometimes government behaves inefficiently" to "government is bad".
It's not confined to the US by any means; I recently watched a tv report on the Scottish town of Paisley, which I knew rather well.
Apart from being where I finished school, it was where I had my first studio for some years. Such temporal fame aside (joke), it was traditionally strong for its two big cotton companies, Clarks and J&P Coats, that became the biggest thread producers in the world, with branches in the States, amongst many other countries.
But all that died in Paisley during the second half of last century: the original factories closed, and attempts to replace that work with steel production and car factories also came to sticky ends, the latter not entirely without the help of industrial political sabotage and the stupidity inherent in putting a car manufacturing company into a logical vacuum, a place where the engines had to be shipped hundreds of miles from Coventry, down in southern England. Paisley is now a mess; don't know about Coventry. As for the Clyde's shipyards, echo Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the rest of them.
Yes, there is a huge problem associated with cheap labour in other countries, something that makes local production look more expensive, but perhaps it could be avoided, not by government-inspired/ruled isolationism, but by the customer base realising that buying foreign-made is ultimately going to cost you your own job. I have no problem with the concept of foreign car companies such as BMW setting up in the US, for example, and selling their US-made machines there. I do have a problem with the same companies then marketing those cars elsewhere at prices that may undercut the cost of buying the same car were it made in other lands where it might have been made just as easily and well.
BMW makes the Mini in England, and I can remember shortly after the financial mess of '08, with the pound in free fall against the euro, that I needed to change my old car for something new. (Really bad synchronicites.) To my surprise, I noted that the price of the Mini, in Spain, part of the euro area, did not go down to match the fall in the pound - did not go down at all... It's hard to avoid the conclusion that business is just one gigantic stitch-up, everywhere. I bought yet another Ford instead, my sixth.
As for working wives, that's a topic so huge and complex that it deserves its own landscape, never mind thread!
Rob
