Recent labor protests and the implementation of “right to work” legislation across the United States have raised questions about the obligations of corporations to care for their workers. For scholars of labor, this is an apt moment to reflect on the history of the company town. Company towns such as Carnegie Steel's McDonald, Ohio and Hershey's Hershey, Pennsylvania arose in sites of industrial production across the global north. Under an ethic of corporate paternalism, these planned communities offered subsidized housing to laborers in hopes of retaining a settled workforce. Hospitals, shops, and utilities, too, were managed and provided by the company.
In Company Towns, Neil White seeks to counter what he identifies as a “structuralist approach” that dominates the study of these places. He argues that this approach, buttressed by popular representations in song, film, and drama, has created a homogenous image of company towns as places where laborers were (often frustratingly) dependent upon corporate largesse for survival. To counter this, White uses archival material from corporate and town records as well as oral history and journalism to engage “with the scores of manufactured time-bound, and historically relevant settlements obscured by the term [company town]” (p. 5).
White compares two such towns and the wider communities that sprang up around them in the early twentieth century. The first is Corner Brook, a paper mill company town in Newfoundland, where the author grew up. The second is Mount Isa, a mining town in Queensland, Australia. Though both were sites of similarly organized extractive industry, White argues that each developed a distinct communal identity. In doing so, he seeks to highlight “the experiences of the residents whose actions filled in the vast gaps between wilderness and industry to create local societies” (7) over the structural forces that appear to make company towns essentially the same. “Community,” for White, is the agentive antidote to “corporate order.”
The book is structured thematically, with chapters about the developments of industry in Corner Brook and Mount Isa (chs. 1 and 2); “fringe towns” that sprang up on the outskirts of both (ch. 3); labor organization (ch. 4); small businesses and economic development (ch. 5); and domestic life (with a brief discussion of gendered dynamics) (ch. 6). In this last chapter, White deploys the term “structures of feeling” to compare the oppositional, male-dominated community of Mount Isa with the more conciliatory and gender-balanced Corner Brook. That White adopts this concept, most associated with the work of Raymond Williams (1977), without referencing Williams, is puzzling.
Chapter 3's discussion of the relationship between “company towns” and the “fringe towns” where “unskilled” workers lived is especially thought provoking. Explaining how the fringes served as a creative complement to rigid company town life, White sets the company town within a larger spatial network and shows how labor geographies and cultural geographies intersected. His discussion of how company paternalism contributed to or contended with community resilience in times of economic downturn, such as the Great Depression, complicates facile narratives of corporate austerity during such periods.
Readers will be most interested in White's comparative data, and his timely study certainly invites further inquiry into the relationship between labor, geography, and cultural production.
