Facebook Building a Company Town

cold fjord writes "The Wall Street Journal reports, 'Facebook Inc.'s sprawling campus in Menlo Park, Calif., is so full of cushy perks that some employees may never want to go home. ... The social network said this week it is working with a local developer to build a $120 million, 394-unit housing community within walking distance of its offices. ... the 630,000 square-foot rental property will include everything from a sports bar to a doggy day care. Even in Silicon Valley, where tech companies compete to lure coveted engineers with over-the-top perks and offices that resemble adult playgrounds, Facebook's plan breaks new ground. A Facebook spokeswoman said employee retention wasn't a major factor in the real estate push. "We're certainly excited to have more housing options closer to campus, but we believe that people work at Facebook because what they do is rewarding and they believe in our mission," she said. Some employees had inquired about places to live near the corporate campus, she said ... The development conjures up memories of so-called "company towns" at the turn of the 20th century, where American factory workers lived in communities owned by their employer and were provided housing, health care, law enforcement, church and just about every other service necessary.'"

Comments

accidental lie by omission.

[Anonymous Coward]

>were provided housing, health care, law enforcement, church and just about every other service necessary.'

Amazing how you can make servitude sound good if you omit enough.

They were also "provided" with constantly mounting debt and money unusable anywhere else to make them docile, servile, and put them at the bosses' mercy.

Re:accidental lie by omission.

[AthanasiusKircher]

>were provided housing, health care, law enforcement, church and just about every other service necessary.'

They were also "provided" with constantly mounting debt and money unusable anywhere else to make them docile, servile, and put them at the bosses' mercy.

Indeed. There's a reason for the chorus of the song Sixteen Tons, which tells about the plight of the coal miner in a company town:

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go -- I owe my soul to the company store.

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article on company towns also seems to sweep away a lot of the negative stuff -- maybe the people who wrote the summary only read about the Wikipedia version of reality.

That said, historical company towns that didn't force workers to use scrip avoided some of these issues -- but that would mean allowing workers easily to exit the town by actually paying them real money, which they could take elsewhere. Many historical companies didn't want to allow that, so no matter how benevolent the educational and social things the company provided, it was often essentially a kind of slavery.

Re:accidental lie by omission.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

So you may owe your soul to the company store, but fortunately, you can pay in Zynga tokens.

Re:accidental lie by omission.

[AthanasiusKircher]

It wasn't essentially slavery. At worst it was essentially debt bondage.

There are lots of terms thrown around for putting people in a situation where they are effectively forced to work and their freedom is removed. "Debt bondage" is one. "Serfdom" and "indentured servitude" are others, and there are more. Yes, I agree there are distinctions to be made about exactly how the systems operate, but in many cases these systems have effectively very similar results as slavery. And I'm by no means the first to use this term to refer to the practices of company towns.

Slavery means a personal is held as property by another person and is made to do work with no pay. That simply wasn't how company towns operated.

I agree that the workers were not legally "owned" by the company, and therefore according to the standard definition of "slavery" they were not "slaves." But note that I did say "essentially a kind of slavery," not slavery per se.

As to how "company towns operated," the company often did in fact make a person "do work with no pay." Workers were often rewarded only with company scrip rather than money for their work, which frequently meant that they could only redeem their "pay" for items available at company-owned stores and separate company-owned town businesses. Prices were generally inflated to ensure that workers rarely were able to "save" anything (and even if they did, they couldn't spend it outside of the town, so it would be effectively worthless). In more extreme cases, companies would deliberately structure their "prices" to ensure workers were in a state of continuous debt.

The net result: a person is forced to continue working for a company indefinitely, with little hope of ever accumulating any meaningful "pay" that could ever be spent in the outside world.

Sorry, but that's SLAVERY without the technical legal "property" aspect. Workers may not have been "bought" and "sold" in the way slaves were, but in most other respects, they could be bound to serve their master. Remember also that the company towns mostly flourished before modern workers' rights, so while workers may not have been abused to the extend that slaves were on the worst plantations, they could still be made to suffer significantly.

Now, of course, many company towns weren't that bad. But many slave plantations weren't that bad either. Many companies treated their workers benevolently, and many slave owners paid for their slaves to be educated too. Conditions varied significantly for both groups. I'm not saying these two things are equivalent -- but debt bondage is still "bondage," which is another common word for slavery.

I encourage you to seek to set the historical record straight but I implore you not to exaggerate and by doing so treat another group - in this case management of company towns - as fallaciously as the group you are championing has been treated.

I appreciate the politeness of your response. But I'm frankly not sure what "group" I am supposedly "championing." I'm trying to get at the historical reality of how bad conditions COULD BE (not everywhere, maybe not even in most company towns). I do not mean at all to disparage those company managers who did indeed treat workers fairly and benevolently. But there were plenty of places where workers were abused and effectively put into "debt bondage" as you put it (a topic I actually linked to in my original post).

But to me, in extreme cases, whether or not we call that tantamount to slavery is just a matter of semantics -- someone who doesn't have freedom to make significant choices about his life and is forced to work for someone else is, to my mind, a slave. Whether the government recognizes him as "being owned" by someone else is a legalistic quibble that serves to excuse heinous practices while technically outlawing "slavery."

Re:accidental lie by omission.

[AthanasiusKircher]

Once again, from a legal standpoint, an employee was not property -- thus, again, technically we're not talking about slavery per se. But if you were in debt, often you technically could not leave legally. From a practical standpoint, it might be hard to track you down, but from a practical standpoint it could be hard to find a runaway slave as well. A choice of forced work for a company or forced labor in debtors prison (or more likely poorhouses or poor farms in the late 1800s) isn't much of a choice. And, for the record, there were even cases where a child was forced to work for years to pay off a father's debt to a company store... while such people may have been technically free to leave, legally they could only be free by paying off the debt, and the company often had the means to basically make that impossible without outside help or money.

The mission?

[93 Escort Wagon]

What mission is it the company thinks employees believe in, exactly? It's hard to believe the employees find it meaningful and rewarding to sell people's personal information or push advertisements into people's news feeds...

Re:The mission?

[uvajed_ekil]

I like to hire smart employees: the ones who are loyal first to themselves, and their paychecks. We work in "Corporate America" to make money and fund the rest of our lives, not for some vague corporate "mission" that has no intrinsic value of its own. Yes, my employees better do their jobs and do them well, and they know that. They also know they will continue to be paid fairly well as long as they do their jobs. I don't screw them, they mostly don't try to screw me, and we skip all the superficial BS. If they find jobs that pay them more than I can, I wish them well. I've never had anyone leave for a company with a fancy mission statement - just money I can't compete with.

Not really

[timeOday]

Key quote:

The apartments will go for market rates, and a handful will be set aside for low income residents. All but 15 of the units will be open to non-Facebook employees.

So, it's a new 394-unit development in Menlo Park, which is near Facebook (and lots of other things).

Re:Not really

[TrippTDF]

Way, way past time to acquire. I had friends that just sold their 3 bedroom, mid-century home for well over a million dollars.... The house will likely be torn down and replaced with something larger. Had the house been newer or bigger, the property would have got for more. The 1+ million was essentially for the lot.

Re:Not really

[msauve]

"Way, way past time to acquire."

Yep. Buying an orchard in the 1950's, in the Valley of Heart's Delight, was the way to go.

Re:Not really

[Half-pint HAL]

Still, even a teacher in East Palo Alto could probably teach them not to end a sentence with a preposition... .

I'm assuming East Palo Alto is a largely Hispanic area then, because not ending a sentence with a preposition is fine for Spanish and for French (remember, the English elite were mostly French, hence words like élite), but English is a different language. This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.

Circles

[Amorymeltzer]

For those who haven't read it yet, the NYT Magazine has an excerpt from a new Dave Eggers book named Circles . It captures this sort of thing eerily well.

Ad Revenue

[maz2331]

They make a boatload of cash on ad revenues, plus charging commercial entities for "reach" - ie, a "friend" of Coca Cola may not see many posts unless Coke ponies up the cash to reach X-number of eyes.

Re:really?

[TrippTDF]

This reminds me of the book Oryx and Crake. This is essentially the first private, corporate community. There will be many more like them in the future.

These people will not be part of the community in which the buildings exist. They will not give back to the community. Hell, I bet some tax loopholes will ensure their money doesn't even make it into the local economy.

And the work is rewarding because Facebook has a mentality that they are changing the world. They are, of course, but not in the ways that they tout. They say they are making the world more connected. However, I feel way less connected to my friends and Family now that I see their updates on Facebook. All they have done is created a super awesome database of private information and given the keys to the Government, all while creating a new sort of loneliness among people.

I owe info to the company store

[cervesaebraciator]

Some people say a man is made outta mud
A code monkey's got Mountain Dew for his blood
Dew in the blood and Cheeto bones
A bad back and carpal tunnel syndrome

You click 16 likes and whaddaya get?
Another ad targeted to your regret
Can't get a new job for what my profile showed
I owe info to the company store

I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my laptop and I coded a line
I coded PHP and in Javascript
And off to Menlo Park then I was shipped

You click 16 likes and whaddaya get?
Another ad targeted to your regret
Can't get a new job for what my profile showed
I owe info to the company store

If you see me comin', better step aside
The Dew and Cheetos made me a little too wide
A little too wide and a little too old
But for Facebook's perks my soul I've sold

You click 16 likes and whaddaya get?
Another ad targeted to your regret
Can't get a new job for what my profile showed
I owe info to the company store

Key Features

[FuzzNugget]

Greetings are made not by waiving, but giving a thumbs up (anyone giving thumbs down will be publicly beaten)

Everyone is needy and constantly pesters you to be their "friend"

The town bulletin board is full of trite comics and jokes (and nothing useful)

Traveling salesmen do recon by eavesdropping on all your conversations and then show up at your door to sell you everything they think you want to buy

Every few weeks, someone walks into a stranger's home after dark, takes off all their clothes and tells everyone about embarrassing personal matters before they realize they got off at the wrong bus stop

The population numbers are inflated because everyone uses multiple identities and fake IDs

Public works tears down all the infrastructure and rebuilds everything from scratch every year (the townsfolk protest about it for 5 minutes before relenting)

Re:And how do these guys make $$$ again?

[agm]

With Facebook you are not the customer, you are the product.

misread

[johntromp]

"to a doggy day care"

I originally read that as "dodgy day care" ...

-John

Re:And how do these guys make $$$ again?

[Dahamma]

Yep. That's exactly how it works.