Gregg Spotts: Filming A New American Dilemma

Kathleen Herd Masser
Mirror contributing writer
  
   Imagine walking into work one day – as you had for 30 years – and learning that your job had moved. It was on its way to India, China, Pakistan, or Turkey.
   This is what Gregg Spotts hopes to do with his documentary film American Jobs – etch this image into the public consciousness and jumpstart the outsourcing dialogue.
   Spotts, a Santa Monica resident and chair of the city’s Arts Commission, is the first to admit that though he “always wanted to figure out a way to become a filmmaker,” he’s an unlikely candidate for the role of documentarian. His background is in television entertainment and sports production, and the closest he had come was a 35-minute video of the L.A. Galaxy’s 2002 championship season.
   What started as a cursory research project “got to be an obsession. But I was scared to take six months off work. I was about to be married. You don’t usually quit your job when you’re about to be married.”
   In fact, it was Spotts’ wife, along with his mother, who pushed him to go out and do the film. They also paid for the camera. So earlier this year, from January to April, Spotts visited more than 15 cities and towns in seven states.
   The film also includes a local sequence. Spotts sent Santa Monica High School students to clothing stores to research where garments are made. In what has become the opening scene of the film, they reveal what they learned.
   Viewers also meet Patricia Treece, who lives in Kannapolis, North Carolina, where for 31 years she worked 12-hour shifts for textile manufacturer Pillowtex. In 1982, the company had 18,000 employees. By 2003, only 4,000 workers remained. That July, the plant closed down. Pillowtex was self-insured for health coverage, so Treece never had the option of converting to a private insurance plan. Today she spends her time visiting church groups and social service agencies, pleading for help in getting her thyroid medication.
   Spotts also talks with Myra Bronstein, a senior engineer at a software company in Washington. When Bronstein and 60 of her co-workers were notified that they were being replaced, they were simultaneously ordered to train their replacements, who were being flown in for instruction. Those who refused risked losing their severance pay and unemployment benefits.
   In Orlando, Spotts interviews former Siemens employees who were replaced – at their own desks – by computer programmers from India, admitted to the U.S. on guest worker visas. In Seattle, his subjects are current and former employees of Boeing, including a machinist who explains how the company is shipping complex, computer-controlled machine tools – one by one – to lower wage countries.
   “There is no safety net for people who are displaced,” Spotts has learned. “In North Carolina alone, 80,000 people are receiving the supplemental benefits the government pays to those who lose their jobs to trade. They’re all going to community colleges – paid for by the government – but they don’t know what to study. They don’t have a crystal ball to tell them what jobs will be outsourcing-proof.
   “As manufacturing shrinks as a percentage of the economy,” Spotts fears, “the percentage of people being forced out are easier to marginalize since they’re a smaller and smaller segment. The suffering in manufacturing has been widely documented and widely ignored. Now, with engineers, software designers and accountants losing their jobs, white collar workers are better able to relate, as are journalists.”
   American Jobs, Spotts says, “travels up the value chain from low-wage/low-tech to high-wage/high-tech. From the garment industry to manufacturing to computer programming. I want the viewer to look at his wife and say ‘I’m glad we’re not in manufacturing’ then, five minutes later, realize ‘we’re in trouble, too.’”
   Spotts believes the big question is whether cyclical changes in the economy are masking structural changes.
   “We’re in a fascinating moment right now,” he observes. “But the political dialogue about the economy is mind-numbingly simplistic. Structural change is basically driven by the fact that there is a ton of money to be made by producing in low-wage places and selling in high-wage places. It doesn’t matter what you’re producing.”
   Spotts acknowledges that the film is political, but insists it is nonpartisan. “I didn’t start out with a thesis. It’s not a filmic vision of an op-ed piece. I’m not making the film as an activist.”
   He is, however, making it on a budget of less than $40,000. Spotts has no film crew – “eighty percent is just me and the camera.” Editing is done on an Apple laptop computer.
   His objective is to “get it out in time to be part of the conversation before the general election in November.” This means Spotts must bypass the prestigious festival circuit (“Nobody makes a feature film in six months”) and forgo a television debut (“PBS is already scheduling for 2006”).
   “I don’t want it to be stale,” he says. “I want to make an instant snapshot – almost like photojournalism but with a video camera instead – that shows people who have just been laid off.”
   So Spotts is going directly to DVD and hopes to “involve progressive organizations as distribution partners, possibly using the DVD as a gift with donation or subscription.”
   He would also like to tour the film to places like universities and union halls. “My dream,” he says, “is to put students and workers together in the same room.”
   Spotts is aiming for a Labor Day release, not just for the symbolism, but “to force myself to finish it.”
   Once nervous about forsaking his own job security, Spotts now says, “I’m afraid of going back to my old job. I’m afraid it won’t matter to me anymore.”
   “I come from a world of making things look cool. When you get a taste of this other arena, it’s hard to go back.”