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.

[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."

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

misread

[johntromp]

"to a doggy day care"

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

-John