I live in the North of England, which, because Londoners are inherently bigots, is the middle of England. We had Mill towns: Some mill owner with Notions would build a Model town or a set of terraces and lure people in from the smallholdings to work in the mill.
And then they'd own you: You'd buy your bread at the company store at their price, you'd pay them rent, be fined for being late, for dropping your work, for missing quota... If you were super unlucky you'd have to use the company coin, which couldn't be spent anywhere else. Very EA. You'd get a half day off on Sunday to got to church but you'd work 7 days a week. Your kids would get a few hours school, because some interfering politician had made a law saying children had to have an education, then they'd be expected to show for work.
They'd have to crawl under the looms, while they were in operation and scavenge thread and chaff. Meaning the foreman would occasionally haul you off the machine you were working on and tell you your kid just got scalped because the machine caught her hair and ate the top of her head. So sad, back to work, PS you're being fined a penny for not being at your station.
The soot would get everywhere: We were still power washing it off inb teh 90s. Stuff that didn't get it is still stained black. The dust from the fabric would give you Black Lung, and you'd retire at 50, having been deaf for 30 years, hacking up chunks of lung, and be dead by 55. Then the company would charge your family to bury you. And yes: they'd throw them out of the tiny house that shared a toilet with 20 other families.
Oh yes: The shop floor was so loud it'd deafen the workers, and they'd all be lip reading and using ad-hoc local sign language to talk. You know that running joke about OSHA being written in blood? Yeah. It was.
So here's the interesting part. You know who dug us out of this corporate hell?
They took offense at all of this and started showing up, running Co-Op shops. They did the same as the Corporations: Everyting you had to buy, or wanted, was at the Co-Op. Houses (One of the biggest mortgage lenders was a Co-operative bank until Capitalism happened to it), food, clothes, funerals, furniture and banking. You put your wages in to the Co-Op and they'd let you buy everything on lay-away.
And that helped break the Mill's monopoly.
And they also made... chocolate.
The Quakers came to the conclusion that Chocolate was morally correct: It cheered you up, was nourishing, and had no real drawbacks (Hey! Look, white people thinking - They never looked too hard into where cocao was coming from or what the conditions were like. If you're feeling too happy and cheerful go look up the Belgian Congo some time.)
Anyway, you still find these weird little Yorkshire towns with these huge Mill factory buildings, sitting right next to a chocolate factory: Rowntrees (Bought by Nestlé), Mackintoshs, and Cadburys were all Quaker owned co-operative factories with on-site showers, and profit sharing.
Then Capitalism noticed and ate them, yum yum.
Anyway, point being is that there's a working model for how to wreck a Corporation Town: You clone thier operation with a non-profit or Co-Op. They provide the same products and services that Corporations provide, but they put the money back into the pockets of the people, they circulate money instead of accumulating it.
I'm salty about this topic because I live here. I've worked in the Industrial Museum, met the survivors of the Mills (Old age takes no prisoners) and watched the literal colour of my home change from soot black to creamy brown stone, lived in the Mill terraces, watched Nestlé wipe out an entire company and squat in it's corpse while slowly degrading the products to pump up the profits at the consumer's expense and of course run slavery plantations.
Anyway: TL:DR Company towns are slavery and always have been.
stormborns
prguitarman
jacobvanloon
jbbartram-illu
kianamaiart
kaledo-art
