Companies still keep "mother factories" in Japan to refine their production processes and retain skills.
Born in New York, Mr. Núñez moved with his parents to the Dominican Republic, where his mother, a factory worker, was his first piano teacher.
His father was a postman and his mother a factory worker, but he broke away from his roots thanks to hard work and a good education.
Mr. Eire worked odd jobs throughout high school and college: washing dishes at a hotel, bagging groceries, at his mother's factory, as an office clerk.
Mr. Melendez's father, an elevator operator, and his mother, a factory worker, used to pay Ms. Burgos to help him with his schoolwork, she said.
He was born in Sydney in 1939, an only child, but lost his father at six in a plane crash when he was returning from a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and was raised by his mother, a factory worker.
But her mother's factory closed, and now she is trying to teach herself basics from a textbook on industrial electronics when she is not at her retail job.
Her latest movie, Suffragette, is a weighty film about the women's rights movement in which she plays an exhausted mother and factory worker who helps to lead a surge of violent attacks on the government.
"Dancer in the Dark," Lars von Trier's fable about a single mother and factory worker who is losing her sight, will open the 38th New York Film Festival, which runs Sept. 22 through Oct. 9.
