Fuyao Workers Detail Hazards as Congress Stonewalled

Former employees of a Chinese-owned glass plant in Moraine, Ohio, told a Democratic congressman that they faced unbearable heat, communication barriers and anti-union pressure on the job — and warned that workers were told to “expect deaths in that plant.” The roundtable, held Tuesday in Dayton by Rep. Ro Khanna of California, followed the company’s refusal to cooperate with a congressional oversight inquiry.

According to Fox News, the Oct. 6 gathering at the Industrial Division of the Communications Workers of America headquarters was convened after Fuyao Glass America and its parent, Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co., Ltd., largely rebuffed Khanna’s requests for documents on their business and labor practices.

A Company Under Scrutiny

Fuyao’s Moraine plant is the centerpiece of the Chinese manufacturer’s U.S. investment — a former General Motors facility that Fuyao took over in the mid-2010s and built into what trade publications describe as the world’s largest automotive glass factory. The company drew national attention in 2019 as the subject of the Netflix documentary “American Factory,” which chronicled its takeover and its aggressive effort to keep unions out.

The plant’s recent history includes a fatal 2018 accident and a sprawling federal raid. That same history is now colliding with a congressional inquiry into how the company operates on American soil.

Worker Testimony

Tiffany Moore, a three-year Fuyao veteran now working at Duramax, described punishing conditions and a persistent language barrier with Chinese supervisors. “The heat in there is unbearable. They don’t care,” Moore told the group. “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.”

Moore said leaving safely required stealth: putting in two weeks’ notice, she explained, risked being fired before she could complete it, so she “had to actually sneak out” and complete orientation at a new employer before calling Fuyao to resign.

Demetria Hodges, who spent five years at Fuyao before also moving to Duramax, recounted being struck by a forklift driven by a Chinese operator she believed to be unlicensed. “It was on camera, they have cameras in there, and they acted like they didn’t know who the forklift driver was,” Hodges said, adding that the response complicated her lawsuit and workers’ compensation claim.

The workers also said their Chinese counterparts were treated worse — prohibited from mixing with American employees and rotated in and out every few months, arriving by bus or van from New York. They added that Chinese workers were nearly always selected for promotions because the company could pay them less.

Union Allegations and the 2018 Death

Much of the testimony centered on the company’s treatment of organized labor. “They wouldn’t let a union come in there,” Moore said. “You couldn’t even speak of a union being in there.”

Darrell Jones, another former employee, said Fuyao threatened to strip workers of their health insurance if they unionized, and recalled a supervisor’s warning: “If we ever get a union there, he was going to shut it down.” Hodges said the company offered a one-time $2-per-hour pay bump to employees who voted no in a planned unionization referendum. Workers voted roughly two-to-one against United Auto Workers representation in November 2017, according to WYSO.

Jones also described the aftermath of the 2018 death of forklift operator Ricky Patterson. “When that guy got smashed by that glass, we had to work that day,” Jones said, describing how Patterson — who had recently lost his mother and was, in Jones’ words, “a little shaky” — was loading glass when a loose panel fell and crushed him.

Patterson, 57, died of blunt-force injuries to the head and neck after being found pinned between a forklift and a pallet of heavy glass, WYSO reported at the time. Fuyao later paid a $7,000 OSHA penalty in an informal settlement tied to the safety violation.

Sam Sanders, president of IUE-CWA Local 84775, relayed a warning he said came from a now-deceased former worker. “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,’” Sanders said. Asked to repeat it, he did: “Expect deaths in that plant.”

A Federal Probe and a Congressional Standoff

The roundtable is the latest stage in a widening scrutiny of Fuyao’s U.S. operations. In July 2024, Homeland Security Investigations, IRS Criminal Investigations and the FBI searched the Moraine plant and 27 other Dayton-area locations over “allegations of financial crimes and labour exploitation,” as The Epoch Times reported. Fuyao said at the time that it was not the target of the investigation and was cooperating with a probe into a third-party labor services company.

Separately, Khanna, the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party, opened his own inquiry. He first requested documents from Fuyao in July 2026, asking about CCP subsidies and the company’s governance. Fuyao replied with a single letter on Sept. 23 that, Khanna wrote in an Oct. 1 follow-up, “answers virtually none of the Committee’s questions in a material way and fails to include any document submissions.” He has requested an onsite visit before Nov. 1 and threatened a subpoena.

What’s Next

Khanna framed the issue as a test of how the U.S. welcomes foreign investment. “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,” he 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.”

The congressman said he hopes to craft legislation reforming how foreign companies can acquire U.S. factories and to create an industrial development bank to fund domestic manufacturing.

Fuyao did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment. Several open questions remain: whether the company will produce the documents Khanna has demanded, whether he will make good on his subpoena threat, and what, if anything, the still-unreleased federal investigation ultimately concludes. For the workers who testified in Dayton, the answers carry weight far beyond a single factory floor.