My Google-fu is failing me at the moment, but I seem to vaguely recall reading about a company (the time period associated with this company is somewhere between 1940-1980, I’m thinking) that required its employees and their families to live in this “city” that the company had built, and the company paid them with a currency that could only be used inside that city. It wasn’t recognized anywhere outside of that city as a legitimate currency.
That’s known as a company town and was fairly common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ah. Thank you. I knew I wasn’t imagining it. I just wasn’t familiar with the actual term. Trying to google the description wasn’t helping me any.
You load 16 tons, 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
See also Company Store.
Redacted, Joey P and Peter Morris beat me too it.
Press on.
And the pseudo-currency is “Company Scrip”
I live in a town adjacent to Vandergrift, PA. Way back when Vandergrift was established as a company town. There was a mill (steel?) and a neighborhood built around it. Working in the mill you got a salary, a home, stores. Pretty cool concept. Ties in with the world’s fair story.
You and I studied very different 19th and early 20th century company towns.
And there were the kind of company towns designed to provide good homes and social facilities for the workers - but with all sorts of rules to kee them sober and “respectable” - Saltaire, Bournville, Port Sunlight.
This turned into a hijack of the original thread. So thanks to a flag, I spun it off. In the future try Replying as a linked Topic:
If you are responding to something in a thread that is basically off-topic or likely to lead to a hijack, try this:
How to Reply as a linked Topic:
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
And/or follow very different YouTube channels:
Some started out patronizingly benevolent. Some deliberately exploitative.
It is not exclusively megacorporations that issue company scrip. Sometimes non-company towns will circulate a local currency as an economic stimulus:
There’s another type where one company is the major employer and the economy revolves around the company and its workers. The company doesn’t own lodgings or stores, but businesses and workers are dependent on them.
Schenectady is an example of this: GE was the major employer and as they reduced workers, the city suffered.
And … in a Central New York bastion of liberalism:
College towns - towns where the major “industry” is a college, are a special case of this.
The town of Ajax, Ontario grew out of government housing for a WW2 munitions plant (the Defence Industries Limited Pickering Works).
Kohler, Wisconsin. Unlike, say, Pullman in Chicago, the company allowed for home-ownership; but you couldn’t paint it just any color you wanted.
Company towns were an invention of the companies that needed workers to show up for work. In the NW woods, the workers would get paid, get drunk, not show back up to work.
I lived in a company sawmill town when I was young. They built houses, nice wooden sidwalks, and rented them to the mill workers for a nominal fee and the workers would bring their wives. The men would not be getting too drunk to go to work, they are going to work because their family was there. There usually was a small store, hence I owe my soul to the company store. The company had plenty of basically free wood to make homes and the entire town.
And the idea of building houses for the workers, worked. They were all coming to work when they had a wife at home. No staying home hung over.
An entire town, with a dining hall, dance hall for other events, perhaps a small school, etc.
The town I grew up in no longer exists, not a single board, but it was a special time and place in my life. But here it is, Bradwood Oregon. Sawmill, deep water port right off the Columbia River. Train.