‘Expect deaths at this factory’: Former employees describe hazardous conditions at Chinese-owned Ohio plant

A Chinese glass manufacturer’s decision not to comply with a congressional oversight inquiry prompted Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., to convene a revealing roundtable with the plant’s former workers, where they described a series of hazardous work conditions and fears for their safety.

Khanna, the ranking member on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), first reached out to Fuyao Glass America and its Chinese parent company Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co., Ltd. in July, requesting documents detailing the company’s business and labor practices.

Fuyao quickly drew the attention of Americans in the Rust Belt and beyond when it became the subject of the 2019 Netflix documentary “American Factory,” which chronicled its takeover of a former General Motors plant outside of Dayton, Ohio.

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The company has since been mired in scandals ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for workplace safety violations to the 2018 death of factory worker Ricky Patterson.

In a subsequent October letter to Fuyao leadership, Khanna decried the company’s refusal to dialogue, condemning them for only sending one single letter in response to his numerous inquiries. Fuyao’s Sept. 23 response, Khanna wrote in his Oct. 1 letter to the company, “answers virtually none of the Committee’s questions in a material way and fails to include any document submissions.”

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Despite Fuyao’s silence, Khanna made the journey to Western Ohio, an area of the country decimated by a loss of manufacturing jobs in recent decades.

Khanna convened a roundtable discussion on Tuesday involving former Fuyao employees and current union leaders at the Industrial Division of the Communications Workers of America (IUE-CWA) headquarters in Dayton, Ohio.

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During the discussion, former Fuyao workers described unbearable heat, an inability to communicate with their Chinese supervisors, and apparent labor violations involving their Chinese counterparts, among other grievances.

“The heat in there is unbearable. They don’t care,” Tiffany Moore, who worked at Fuyao for three years, told the group.

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“There’s the language barrier. They can’t communicate with you. When you try to communicate with them, they’ll send someone else to you. Maybe one of them speaks English,” Moore continued.

Like many of the former Fuyao employees at the table, Moore now works at Duramax, a General Motors-owned engine manufacturer, where she says she is much happier. But to even apply for the position she had to employ clandestine measures to avoid retaliation from her Fuyao bosses.

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“You can’t put your two weeks in because if you put your two weeks, they’ll get rid of you before your two weeks come up for any reason. They’ll tell you they don’t have to have a reason to get rid of you just so that they can fill your position. So when I left there, I had to actually sneak out, do my orientation at DMAX. And then call them and tell them that I wasn’t coming back and for them to release my 401k,” Moore said.

Demetria Hodges, another worker who fled Fuyao for Duramax, recounted the time a Chinese forklift driver, who she believed to be unlicensed, struck her with the machine and faced no accountability.

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“It was on camera, they have cameras in there, and they acted like they didn’t know who the forklift driver was,” she told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview. “So when I tried to pursue a lawsuit and my workman’s comp, they pretended like they didn’t know who the person was.”

While the American workers described abysmal conditions for themselves, they said the Chinese workers were treated even worse.

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“They were treated horrible,” Moore told the group. “They weren’t allowed to take anything from us. They weren’t really allowed to communicate with us. They weren’t allowed to mix with us.”

Moore, Hodges and others said the Chinese workers were almost always the ones chosen for promotions because Fuyao could pay them less. They also said the company was constantly busing in new workers from elsewhere.

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“They used to rotate them out every couple months. Like they will go to New York and get a bus for or a van full of people and bring them down here. And they work for a certain amount of months and then they rotate and send them back,” Hodges said.

When Hodges explained that workers were still forced to come to work the day after part of the factory caught fire, Khanna asked her if the workers were undocumented.

“I believe that’s why they accepted it because they were undocumented,” Hodges said.

Darrell Jones, another former Fuyao employee, told Khanna he felt the workers needed a union backing them, a point which quickly drew heated commentary from the group.

“They wouldn’t let a union come in there,” Moore chimed in. “You couldn’t even speak of a union being in there.”

“Or you could lose your job,” Hodges added.

Jones went on to explain that Fuyao threatened employees, telling them the company would take away their health insurance if they unionized. Hodges then added that the company offered employees a one-time pay bump of $2 an hour if they voted no on a planned unionization referendum.

“They said if we ever get a union there, he was going to shut it down,” Jones recalled a supervisor telling him.

Jones also recalled the circumstances that led up to the tragic 2018 death of 57-year-old Fuyao factory worker Ricky Patterson.

“When that guy got smashed by that glass, we had to work that day,” Jones recounted.

“He was a little shaky because he had just lost his mom. He was trying load up to glass. He cut one end of it. And then he was supposed to put the forklift in front of it, but he didn’t put the forklift in front of it. When he cut that first side, the other side was loose,” Jones said.

“Crushed him,” he concluded.

OSHA fined Fuyao $7,000 in an informal settlement for a safety violation that led to Patterson’s death.

“There’s a guy used to work there, he passed away, he used to tell me all the time, he said he told you guys that ‘you ought to be able to expect deaths in that plant,'” Sam Sanders, the president of IUE-CWA’s local Dayton chapter told the group.

“He said what?” someone asked.

“Expect deaths in that plant,” Sanders reiterated.

Khanna told the group he thought America needed new standards for foreign businesses purchasing or building factories in the U.S., a point he reiterated during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.

“We can welcome foreign investment in the United States of America, we should if they want to open factories, but they have to play by our rules. They have to do things, not like they do in foreign countries, but like they do in America,” Khanna told Fox News Digital.

“That means having safety standards. That means safety standards that are enforced. That means labor neutrality, so you can’t have anti-union campaigns. That means complying with anti-discrimination laws based on gender and race. That means having communication where workers have a voice, that you can treat workers is dispensable,” he continued.

The Silicon Valley congressman went on to explain that he hoped to be able to craft legislation that would reform the current process that allows foreign companies to purchase U.S. factories without much oversight. He also argued that American manufacturing needs a boost from the U.S. government.

“We need an industrial development bank in the United States that invests in places like Dayton, Ohio, to build new factories, to support manufacturers who are making things which we’re currently importing. Why are we just relying on foreign investment?” he asked.

After not being granted an oversight look into the Fuyao factory itself, Khanna still wanted to get a look at the plant from outside, stopping to pose for a picture just a few feet off of company property.

“We need to understand how they’re setting standards. We need to understand how they are complying with American labor law. We need to understand what the impact of foreign investment is so that we can craft legislation to address the issue,” Khanna told Fox News Digital.

“I’m disappointed they aren’t complying because it’s not in any way a gotcha issue. Legislators need this information to be able to address the issue,” he said.

“Everyone should want good jobs where American national security is protected and American standards are protected,” Khanna concluded.

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Fuyao Glass America and Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co. did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.