Roger And Me Analysis

Brief Intro

Roger & Me, is a documentary that was directed by Michael Moore in 1989. The purpose of this documentary was to demonstrate the negative impact the shutdown of General Motors had on the town of Flint, Michigan. According to Michael Moore, Flint was the birthplace and former home to General Motors before Roger Smith, CEO of GM, decided to save money by closing down all the factories in Flint and opening new factories in Mexico, where labor was cheaper. Therefore, laying off over 33,000 employees leading them to live in poverty and increasing the violence rate. Since the majority of the economy was supported by the jobs that GM provided for the citizens in Flint.

Stratification

This film is a great example of stratification because it shows us how Roger Smith, a rich wealthy man only cares about his interested regardless of the damage it made, a longest his interest are meet. Conley also states, that stratification is the systematic inequalities between groups of people that arise as intended or unintended consequences of social processes and relationship. Which applies perfectly to Roger because he remind rich and had a larger revenue by opening his companies in

Mexico. While he explode Mexican workers by paying them less money and having them to work longer hours. Yet, this Mexican workers remind in the same social class “labor workers” because the amount of money they earn is not enough to support their family or to excel higher in the social class pyramid.
As for the citizen of Flint they went from factory workers to homeless, murders, death victim, and robbers. Becoming the number one dangers city in the country since they had no other resources available and they were getting evicted from their homes. Although their situations was very harsh the citizens were still trying to reestablish the economy by construction amusement parks, hotel, but they were not successful compare to the jail they had to build because of the crime increase. However, this is a situation that still is going on because many companies are using the same strategy as Roger.
Conflict and Functionalist Theorist
In my opinion, I think that a conflict theorist would blame most of the fault of what happened in Flint to Rogers Smith.

Roger had a greater advantage over everyone in Flint that was power, money, and respect. He had the power to keep GM open or close as well to assure a couple of jobs. Money to spend, buy, and life a wealthy life style with no deprivations because of course he was CEO of GM. Although he was laying off workers he had the respect of the workers be this auto workers had pride and passion of building GM autos. Using this three things in his advantage he started slowly laying off workers and using that money to build new GM companies in Mexico. Unfortunately, for this auto workers they were no jobs available to them after the laid off as for Roger money was raining to

him.
As for a functionalist theorist I think that they would analyze everything as a one big picture without focusing much in Roger. In this case they would understand that Rogers’s decision on closing the companies to move them to Mexico would be a good idea. Because this strategy would help the company expand wider and increase profit by saving money in the labor. Also they would be helping Mexican workers and economy by proving new jobs. As for the citizens that got lay off they will say that is unfair the way things happened. Also for the layoff I thinks that functionalist will view it as an unfair situation because it only increase the unemployment and crime rate for Flint. Thereby, not providing much resources for their citizens and maybe understanding Flint citizen hard feeling towards GM CEO Rogers Smith.
My Personal Opinion
In my years of being alive I have never knew that GM left thousands of workers without a job and move their companies to Mexico without taken in consideration about the negative impact that it would had to Flint, Michigan. I understand that is cheaper to operate a wealthy company over sea because of the cheap cost of labor and taxes, but not to care at all for their employers who help GM grow that’s unfair. I think that Rogers should have at least left one plantation open to provide some jobs to Flint citizens. However, is something that does not surprise me because the majority companies still continue to use the same strategy to save themselves money. Most of the things that are sale in the United States are made in other countries that we don’t even know exist. The citizens of those countries take those jobs because they need to support their families regardless the pay, but then again that’s part of production. Overall, to me it was a really informative film where I learn something I never knew.