While reading about copper mining out in the wild west, I came across this term, “company towns”. I was hot off of reading a Jane Jacobs collection, so I was curious if this was another one of those types of planned communities that Jacobs always bitched about.
Essentially, it’s a crappy little two-horse town where pretty much all the stores and homes are owned by the one company that also employs everybody. Some were packed with oodles of amenities like churches, schools, and parks. Others were slapped and stapled together, particularly those linked to mining operations. They usually bloomed in places where extractive industries (coal, metal, lumber, etc.) had established monopolies. Though they also could show up around other enterprises, large dam building projects; the garrison societies of peak war manufacturing; the Soviets even had “atomgrads” to stow away their nuclear scientists. And sometimes they happened organically and unplanned in towns that already existed but had a business that moved in and over time became the majority’s employer.
Company towns tended to be substantially exploitative of both whatever resource they were harvesting and their labor force. However, there were some idealists in the mix, and this is seen in the late-19th century trend of “model towns”. These were built by high-minded industrialists appalled at the congested conditions most laborers were living in. They believed that by building a healthier environment for employees, they would make for a more productive company. Well-intended at times, but nonetheless a demonstration of the kind of power a company’s owner had over the lives of those they employed. This ability to socially engineer the lifestyle of the laborer to the benefit of the company’s bottom line is the nightmare fuel of union reps.
The Normal Times 