Abstract
Company towns are towns built by corporations for their employees to live near their workplace. We normally think of them as a 19th-century, or perhaps early 20th-century, phenomena: Robert Owen’s New Harmony, the cottages for Lowell Mill girls, George Pullman’s Town, Carnegie’s Homestead, and Rockefeller’s Ludlow. Owners would often claim they were building them for the workers’ benefit, to uplift their moral standards and improve their living conditions. However, Carnegie’s, Rockefeller’s, and Pullman’s use of the army, state militias, and Pinkerton paramilitary to squelch strikes at their company towns suggests otherwise.
The very claim that the company wanted to improve the worker’s moral standards is not just patronizing. It implies that it is a given that the company is moral and the worker is naturally immoral. He needs the company to rescue him from his own depravation. What is even more serious is the question of how morality is defined. There could be a real conflict of moral values, with opposing codes, where the ultimate good according to one code could be the embodiment of evil by others. Morality in the eyes of the company could mean respect for private property and cooperating in the company’s right to treat the workers as it chooses. Many workers would see this alleged moral action as scabbing, selling-out, betraying your class, being a sycophant, and sacrificing your fellow workers.
Living in company towns, workers would be forced to return their wages to their bosses as rents. They would buy food or anything else they needed or wanted at company-owned stores, again returning their wages to their employers. Often times, they would be paid in script instead of money, so the corporation would never have to pay in currency at all and their employees could not even consider buying elsewhere. Their wages were useless outside the company town. That would make saving or independence impossible. The workers could never accumulate enough to leave the dominion of the company. The company would own the theaters, churches, and schools, and thus control all the workers’ sources of information and entertainment. This was an attempt to determine how employees perceived the world and prevent them from developing ideas, which challenge the corporation. However, there was one thing the companies could never control – how the workers interpreted their own experience. They might be told that everything the company did was fair and equitable, but daily life in the plant and in the town might tell them otherwise.
Establishing company towns could serve two purposes for the corporation: (1) they could retain the wages they paid employees as profit for themselves and (2) they could determine their workers lifestyle and moral values. This would minimize worker resistance to company authority, and prevent them from forming unions, striking, or engaging in other forms of protest that could threaten the company. However, according to Neil White, author of this book, the impact of company towns was more complex.
White offers a history and ethnography of two lesser known early-20th-century company towns on the periphery of capitalism: Corner Brook, a lumber processor in Newfoundland, Canada, and Mount Isa, a mineral processor in the outback of Queensland, Australia. Both were heavily dependent upon foreign investors, primarily British, who subordinated the needs of the plants to the interests and profits of the larger conglomerate. Both were beneficiaries of expanding demand during the world wars and went through precarious times during the Great Depression. Both were located in sparsely populated areas, but acted as magnets for unskilled men, desperate for work. White suggests that a company town could offer them a sense of security, home, and community. As women were recruited, the town could be a safe place to raise a family, and educate children, with the hope that the children might have a better life and not have to serve the company.
The sources White cites and quotes suggest he identifies himself as a Marxist, but one who does not feel bound by the standard assumptions of the paradigm. Although I do not believe White mentions Marxist theorist of education Paul Willis, the two make a similar point. Willis suggests that working-class high school boys do rebel, but theirs is a rebellion which serves capital. To appear ‘cool’, they consume cars and clothes they cannot afford. To pay for them, they neglect school and take low-level jobs at fast foods or factories, where they are forced to submit to their bosses’ discipline. Some may even join the army as the ‘coolest’ thing they can do and become cannon fodder in the service of empire. The employees of Corner Brook and Mount Isa, like most of the working class, come to crave houses and other possessions, but the only source of consumer goods, for them, is the very company they work for. They may even identify possessions as a badge of independence, but in order to acquire these things, they become all the more dependent upon their employers to whom they become heavily in debt.
Some workers might accumulate just enough to buy small homes, start families, give their children an education, which allows them to escape the company, and live in villages, which the companies did not officially own, just outside the company town, ‘suburbs’ if you like. They might sense a modicum of independence and feel they achieved the Canadian or Australian dream, since you can’t call it the American dream. Although we often think of Canada and Australia as more receptive to unions and social services than the United States, these towns were in frontier areas, which tended to embrace an illusion of rugged individualism not that different from the rural United States. It is a rugged individualism which would make workers less likely to join unions,act in the collective interests of their class, or blame anyone other than themselves – certainly not the company or the capitalist system – for their plight, but it would make them more likely to compete against each other to win the favor of their bosses, and become heavily in debt to buy symbols of success. Again, it is a drive for independence that makes them all the more dependent. If they do become homeowners, they will be mortgagees, heavily in debt, but they will perceive themselves as part of the owning class and may actually feel closer to their bosses than renters or the rest of the working class. Anything that threatens the company or the owning class threatens them. This could lead many to consider unions as enemies, not as protectors or representatives. For the corporation, an effectively managed company town will result in complacent, superficially content workers, who will accept their condition, be grateful for their wages and their employment and not challenge company authority. It will engender cooperation far more effectively than heads bashed in by Pinkertons or National Guards. The workers will just secure enough not to do anything that imperil their frail success and some may embrace the corporation as the source of their prosperity.
So as the corporation finds growing profit, it can offer comfort to the employee as a tactic for undermining class conflict, but as Charles Derber and I pointed out in our book The Surplus American, corporations will abandon their workers if they can find greener pastures elsewhere, like even less developed areas, or perhaps in the third world. Closed-down plants leave their former employees impoverished. As company towns become too expensive, corporations will abandon them, along with the resident workers. The knowledge that they could suffer that fate would undermine worker militancy. Carrots may be the preferred way to maintain class harmony, but when all else fails, the stick appears. The fate of Corner Brook and Mount Isa, on the rural periphery, may be the predicament of the urban core, just outside Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Neil White has used these small back-water towns to help explain capitalist dynamics and has written a valuable book, well worthy of a high recommendation that, in a readable way, synthesizes theory and history. He avoids jargon, writes in a way readably understandable by students and the general public, but still offers a new perspective for scholars, who have been studying this phenomenon for years. The author should be proud.