Worker housing in the Kitsap Peninsula timbering town of Port Gamble.
Today’s review of my book in the new issue of The Economist calls The Company Town “delightful.” Quite a boost to the old ego.
Here are some links to recent radio interviews and print articles regarding my book:
I appeared on Pat Thurston’s late night live-interview and call-in program, broadcast across the West Coast region by San Francisco-based KGO-AM, on Sunday October 3. It’s a very interesting show, with callers relating personal information about their experiences in Richmond, California and elsewhere.
On Monday, October 4 I appeared on Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW, discussing company towns in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. There are many such places there, including Port Gamble (pictured), which opened for business in the mid-19th century and only shut down in 1995. You can listen to my interview via the link above.
My New York Public Library appearance was shown on C-SPAN’s Book TV several times over last weekend. You can watch that video by clicking on the link above.
I was interviewed on another late-night radio program, Doug McIntyre’s nationally broadcast Red Eye Radio, on October 12. Callers to that program included a Michigan truck driver who says his freight nowadays often consists of used machinery, picked up at U.S. facilities and on its way to Asia. Red Eye Radio originates in Los Angeles and airs nationally on 25 stations around the United States.
Yesterday afternoon, I appeared on Fox Business television, where I was interviewed by Brian Sullivan. Then, I appeared on Bill Henning’s WNYE-FM program, “Communique,” which is heard in New York City.
The most recent issue of The Conference Board Review carries a Q&A conducted by editor Matthew Budman.
And finally, The Company Town was reviewed on Wednesday in The Tucson Citizen.
The first Chilean miner to surface, Florencio Avalos (ITN News).
“What a moment!” the ITN reporter exclaimed. And as one Chilean miner after another rose to the surface, with hugs all around, who could disagree? “It seems nothing short of a miracle from God,” Mr. ITN concluded.
But think of it this way: The Chilean mine crisis is something like a hostage crisis. As the miners are released from their imprisonment, one is forced to ask: Just who were the hostage-takers? Who profited from their ordeal?
And to what sort of life do the miners return? Will they be celebrity authors of a tell-all book? The New York Times has already reported infighting among them over just who will write their book…and just how many families will share in the royalties. Or will most return to a daily grind of hazardous and arduous below-ground labor?
Mining remains an extremely dangerous occupation, with the Chilean crisis being only the most recent of heart-rending occurrences. Have we already forgotten the West Virginia mine disaster of last spring at Upper Big Branch, which killed 29 American miners?
Let’s not lose sight of what’s really going on here. It’s great that the miners all got Oakley sunglasses and chicken with plums as a final below-ground meal– and that the Chilean President got a boost in his approval rating. It’s great that all the miners have escaped their ordeal. But the planet’s dependence on carbon-based energy–and on the companies that hold us hostage–is a continuing crisis for us all.
After a whirlwind tour of the Left Coast, I’m back in New York and ready for another week of media promoting of my book. I’ll be on Fox Business TV on Tuesday and a variety of NPR stations over the next few days. I’m looking forward to Red Eye Radio in the wee hours of Tuesday morning–those night owls are pretty interesting, as I learned during a similar appearance on San Francisco’s KGO-AM last Tuesday.
I’m now in Seattle after a harrowing flight that took 13 hours…including an unplanned stopover in Syracuse, New York. Here, I will be appearing on a local NPR affiliate station, KUOW, and speaking at Town Hall on Monday evening at 7 p.m. Today was spent getting my bearings and checking out local points of interest, including of course Pike Place Market. Tonight at 1 a.m., I will be on an AM radio call-in show that has listeners from Southern California to Alaska–that’s Pat Thurston’s KGO program. Once aired, the show will be available for download at www.kgoradio.com
I spoke at the New York Public Library on September 21.
My book The Company Town was positively reviewed this morning in the Money Section of USA Today.
And you can read my musings on the future of company towns, “George Jetson on the Unemployment Line,” at the History News Network‘s website.
Later this week, I will be on a publicity tour to Seattle and the San Francisco Bay area. I will be speaking at Town Hall in Seattle (October 4) and at Books Inc. in San Francisco. (October 5)
Tonight at 6 p.m., I’ll be speaking at the Science, Business & Industry Library, 188 Madison Avenue at 34th Street. I’ll describe how company towns remain very much a part of the global scene and end by asking audience members to weigh in with comments and questions.
So far on the various radio programs, I’ve picked up information on even more company towns, ranging from Montreal, Wisconsin, to Morgan Park, Minnesota. New Yorkers, it’s your turn!
I’m basking in the very flattering coverage of my book, The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy. Last week the book was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal and The Minneapolis Star Tribune. Bethanne Patrick, managing editor of Washington, D.C. public television station WETA’s The Book Studio, named my book one of “September’s Top 10 Reads.”
On Monday, I was the guest on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Kathleen Dunn Show, featuring many callers who spoke knowledgeably about the area’s industrial settlements, from U.S. Steel’s Morgan Park, Minnesota to S.C. Johnson’s involvement in Racine, Wisconsin.
Yesterday, I was on Santa Fe, New Mexico NPR affiliate KSFR, speaking on Diego Mulligan’s program “The Journey Home.” And other public radio interviews are scheduled for weeks ahead.
I was also interviewed by Lewis Lapham for his Bloomberg podcast, “The World in Time,” now available online. And the Providence Journal has just posted its review online–it runs in the newspaper on Sunday.
Is my 15-minute allotment of fame coming to an end? Hard to say….
The nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation has just announced findings that will surprise no one: companies that provide their employees with health care coverage are increasingly passing higher premium costs on to their workers. Over the past five years, while wages have increased by only 18%, contributions to health care premiums have jumped 47%, leaving each one paying nearly $4,000 for a year’s worth of family coverage.
But running counter to that unhappy turn of events is a truly surprising mini-trend: The return of what was once called “welfare capitalism,” albeit in an inchoate fashion. My analysis of that trend is described in an op-ed piece in today’s Boston Globe.
In short, many employers are providing subsidies and other forms of aid to help workers with housing costs. Over 700 Chicago-area companies now offer such assistance, as do such outfits as Silicon-Valley-based Applied Materials and, in Washington, CVS Caremark. Corporate support for education has been a trend for years, but it may have even increased during the current recession.
Adding to the parallel with the earlier period of “welfare capitalism” is the development of what we might call substitute unionism. So-called “employee-representation plans,” or company unions created by the boss to subvert union-organizing drives, were outlawed under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Nevertheless, a great many companies now require mandatory arbitration of employment disputes—and the practice was endorsed by a 1991 U.S. Supreme Court decision. Today, more employees are covered by this form of arbitration than are covered by the grievance procedures of independent unions. I’m not endorsing that development–in fact, it seems to me to subvert the NLRA. But it’s a fact of life, for better or worse.
Edward Filene, a pioneer of welfare capitalism at the turn of the 20th century, would be pleased to see so much of his program being brought back to life.
Here are the first pages of a chapter on Gary, Indiana entitled “The Magic City”:
Made-to-order cities are the spectacular civic by-product of the new industrialism. Accustomed though Americans of this day are to rapid accomplishment, not one who visits the suddenly created city of Gary fails to experience a new thrill of amazement. —Graham Romeyn Taylor, SatelliteCities (1915)
In 1904, Elbert H. Gary determined that U.S. Steel, of which he was chairman, was in need of vast new expansion. The huge trust had been created only three years before, when banker J. P. Morgan, Carnegie Steel executive Charles M. Schwab, and others had pulled together “the combination of combinations,” embracing such large outfits as Federal Steel
U.S. Steel Chairman Judge Elbert Gary. Credit: Library of Congress
and Carnegie Steel, and representing 65 percent of the American steel
industry. And already, demand for steel had outpaced U.S. Steel’s resources,
benefiting its competitors. “Judge” Gary, as he was always called thanks to his two terms as a county jurist, delegated the corporate expansion to Eugene Buffington, president of the subsidiary Illinois Steel. And like George Pullman a decade earlier, Buffington and his colleagues decided to build on the edge of Chicago’s spreading metropolitan region.
The corporation considered locations in Waukegan and South Chicago, but the final decision favored 9,000 acres on the Lake Michigan shore across the state line in Indiana. The barren site offered plenty of elbow room at a good price, along with water, railroad access, and proximity to the Chicago labor pool. The corporation went on to build the largest steel mill in the nation there for a new unit called Indiana Steel, along with facilities for corporate holdings American Bridge, American Sheet and Tin Plate, American Car and Foundry, American Locomotive Works, American Sheet and Wire, National Tube, and Universal Portland Cement.
And it built a new city to support the works. Gary, Indiana, as the judge allowed the community to be named, would come to be the largest company town ever constructed in the United States. Gary’s warp-speed incarnation led its promoters to dub it “the Magic City”—a moniker that others, including the mixed-industry town of Middlesborough, Tennessee, had tried to claim but that seemed to fit Gary best of all.
Like most steel men, U.S. Steel’s executives were not eager to become
involved with housing for employees. “We are manufacturers, not real estate dealers,” the head of a large Pittsburgh steel outfit haughtily announced in 1908. “The most successful places in the United States are those farthest removed from suspicion of domination or control by an employer,” averred Buffington. At first, company executives thought they could simply lay out the grid, supply a sewer system and gas lines, and let the community itself take care of the actual residential construction. Before long, though, the corporation was driven to build many residences, since undeveloped lots weren’t selling particularly well and home-building hadn’t taken off. In the end, U.S. Steel built “half a city,” in the words of writer and social reformer Graham Romeyn Taylor. This inclination to abstain from residential building meant Gary was dissimilar from many company towns that had come before, including Lowell, Pullman, Hershey, and even southern textile towns or the towns of the coal belt.
In his article for The Survey, a journal published by the Charity Organization
Society of the City of New York, a social-welfare group, Graham Taylor wasn’t altogether flattering toward Gary. But neither could he help but be impressed: With a population nearing 50,000 only nine years after the first brick was laid, Gary was “probably the greatest single calculated achievement of America’s master industry,” in Taylor’s opinion.
Hormel striker Ray Goodew (at right) with wife Billie and daughter Sandy Titus.
When Austin, Minnesota workers at Geo. A. Hormel & Co. went out on what would come to be seen as THE strike of the decade 25 years ago come this August 16, signs that read “Jay Hormel Cared” began appearing on the front lawns of strikers and supportive townsfolk. The suggestion: Company attitudes toward the area and the workforce had changed for the worse since the benevolent days of a previous generation of company executives, including Jay Hormel. Was the crisis really as simple as that?
Well, in a way, yes.
In the 1980s, I lived and worked in Austin as part of a labor consulting firm that supported the strikers. I had previously been to many company towns—a category that surely included Austin—from Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina to Gary, Indiana. But I had never reflected that much on the phenomenon. Twenty-five years later, I have researched and published a historical survey of America’s company towns. That work casts interesting perspective on the choices made by businesses past and present.
Over the decades since the early 19th century, there have been a lot of American company towns—perhaps as many as 2,500. (When she learned that I was writing a book on these communities, a historian at one New England industrial museum remarked: “Oh, how many volumes will it be?”) And as you might expect, U.S. company towns vary greatly. But at the extremes, there are two distinct models: The benevolent, paternalistic town, typified by chocolate man Milton Hershey’s Hershey, Pennsylvania and today’s Corning, New York, hometown of high-tech glassmaker Corning Inc.; and the “Satanic mills” model, where workers are treated almost like prisoners and exploited in every way imaginable, from being paid low wages for brutal labor to being required to shop at the company store. The clearest examples of the latter model were in coal country, from such burgs as Harlan and Jenkins, Kentucky to Trinidad, Colorado.
As recently as the 1970s, Austin clearly followed the benevolent, paternalist model. It took a militant 1933 strike and years of labor militancy, but by the 1940s the company and its workforce had settled on a social compact that included profit-sharing, incentive pay, a pace of work determined not by company foremen but by the workers themselves, and Hormel Foundation support for area charities. “If a man is going to work for anybody else, it’s hard to beat Hormel,” one worker told an industrial-relations researcher in the 1950s. Seventy-five percent of Austin residents owned their own homes in that decade, and virtually all workers possessed recent-model cars.
But many Hormel managers were never altogether content with the arrangement and by the 1980s, the increasing power of low-wage, antiunion companies in meatpacking seemed to persuade Hormel management that the social compact should be radically altered. Even though their company was highly profitable, if they didn’t cut Austin workers’ pay dramatically, Hormel executives argued, these low-wage outfits would run them out of business. So they opted to move closer to the “Satanic mills” model that I have described above. They weren’t alone: Across the Midwest, once-prosperous meatpacking towns are now the scenes of trailer-park blight, crime, and poverty.
However, one thing becomes clear as a result of an in-depth look at industrial-relations practices across America’s company-town past. Pure economics are never the sole determining consideration in managerial decisions about human relations. It helps to be rolling in money, of course. But such factors as the national political climate, the availability or scarcity of a needed labor force, and concern for positive public relations and consumer brands are all taken into account in corner-office policy-making. And then there’s just good business sense: Fair dealing, good behavior, and mutual trust are key to making markets possible; why shouldn’t they likewise be key components of human-relations policies?
Chocolate man Milton Hershey and student. Credit: Hershey Community Archives. There’s great diversity and a wide range of profitability among the progressive companies that built America’s benevolent company towns. These outfits are as various as Hershey Foods, which for years has supported an academically respected school for orphans via a trust backed by all of the company founder’s personal stock-holdings; Kaiser Industries, a welfare-capitalism pioneer whose 8.6-million-member Kaiser Permanente Health Plan is an outgrowth of the low-cost medical coverage provided to the company’s shipyard workers in the 1940s; Pacific Lumber, recently reorganized as Humboldt Redwood Co., an environmentally responsible, lumber-harvesting outfit and proprietor of the pin-neat town of Scotia, California, where workers have historically received low rent, full medical benefits at a company-run hospital, above-market wages, college scholarships for their kids and more; and, as mentioned before, Corning Inc., which has funded urban revitalization and local educational institutions in its upstate New York hometown through years both fat and lean.
In 2009, Hormel enjoyed net sales of $6.5 billion, and earnings per share were up 22%, according to the company’s annual report. Yet the events of 25 years back remain etched in many Americans’ memory. In an attempt to turn the page, Hormel tries to pretend that nothing ever happened—as if it did not unilaterally reduce its workers’ wages and require the deployment of the Minnesota National Guard and a legion of other police to break a strike that had become a national cause celeb among labor supporters. A two-tier wage structure put in place following the strike is still in force. But if Hormel really wants reconciliation with the past, a good place to begin would be with a reconsideration of the enlightened policies it forsook in 1985.
