END OF THE LINE
The documentary film END OF THE LINE is about globalisation, as seen by a Finnish factory worker. It portrays the struggle for survival between a bus body factory under threat of closure and its employees, whose jobs and livelihood are at stake.
The main character in the film, Pertti Oksman, is a socialist and the senior shop steward at the Carrus Helsinki factory. He started working at the Wiima factory (now Carrus Helsinki) twenty years ago, when the bus body factory operating in Vantaa was still a family business.
The Volvo group bought Carrus Helsinki at the end of 1997 and, after just a few months, the employees learned that the factory would be closed down. The factory receives plenty of orders and keeps on getting good returns; they have more work than there’s time to do. But this isn’t enough for the multinational Volvo, whose goal is to be one of the biggest bus manufacturers in the world. Volvo is going to close down the factory that was founded in the early 1950s and move its production to a mammoth factory under construction in Poland, in which it plans to centralise all its European bus production. Before this, however, Finnish workers are supposed to teach the Poles to build buses, so that production can start in Poland. Simultaneously, Volvo will close down other bus body factories across Europe, including Germany, Austria and Scotland.