I think more typical now in the states in business is bosses detached from what employees are doing thinking everything is easier than it actually is, rigid pressure, criticism of anyone who doesn't bend to their reality and then the oddball comment here or there about how they're fostering a creative and open environment.
Not sure what production environments are like, but back in the 1990s, the US was somewhere between exporting jobs to mexico but also doing still a lot of US manufacture (the cabinet factory that I worked in is now out of business, but eased lending had re-doing kitchens booming - tons of honey oak cabinets...the hallmark of the 1990s here, as well as the early days of RTF white cabinets with MDF doors - yuck).
I have only a couple of neighbors now who work in higher end manufacturing, or worked. Their locations have been bought and sold and merged and so on and so forth and it sounds like the political games are common in them setting older workers to fail so that they can get them to leave voluntarily.
I did spend my first 8 years in a very large global consulting firm, and even much of their work has been outsourced to india now. Getting opposing directives from different groups was constant, and they literally did nothing to reconcile (the standards group would say budget couldn't constrain standards, you'd have to write the time off, and the finance group forbade writing off any time charges - when you asked which prevailed just to figure out what to do, they would say "those two requirements are not in conflict").