The return of the company town?

[lunasun]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/companies-meddling-in-employee-health-since-1880-2013-04-11?Link=obnetwork

With health-care costs relentlessly rising, employers are trying new tactics to promote wellness in the workforce, ranging from gimmicks like cash prizes for workers who undergo detailed health screenings to serious tough-love measures such as charging hundreds of dollars a year in higher premiums for those who can’t or won’t quit smoking or lose weight.

What’s worth remembering about such degrees of corporate paternalism is that while you may not have heard much about them until recently, they’re certainly nothing new. Take a (once) famous example from the 19th century: railroad car magnate George Pullman’s efforts to promote clean living and boost profits by building his own village — named Pullman — on the outskirts of Chicago. Of course, this was justified in the name of the greater good: Pullman believed he had a right, if not an obligation, to improve his workers’ health and morals. Otherwise, he contended, weak and lazy lifestyle choices would hurt his railcar company’s profitability — much as today’s employers promote fitness culture in the name of both a healthier workforce and lower shared health-care premiums.

How did it work out?
Not well. “Workers resented Pullman’s interference in their lives,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson, in West From Appomattox, an account of the Reconstruction. Cox cites another then-contemporary news account, from the Pittsburgh Times: “The corporation is everything and everywhere… The corporation does everything but sweep your room and make your bed, and the corporation expects you to enjoy it and hold your tongue.”

Eventually, the town of Pullman played a cameo role in one of the era’s major labor disputes: When an industrial crisis in the 1890s prompted Pullman to cut his railway workers’ wages, he refused to simultaneously lower the rents that his tenants had to pay to live in the town. Since Pullman’s company gave hiring precedence to town residents, those that sought to move out also risked losing their jobs, according to H.W. Brands’s The Restless Decade: America in the 1890s. Pullman’s stand on rent proved to be the spark that set off a major strike, eventually settled only after President Cleveland sent federal troops to intervene.

[Arctic Dave]

1. Town? Small potatos.

They are going for the company state and company country.

[marmar]

2. ^

[TlalocW]

3. Maybe if it were like

Hershey, Pennsylvania, back when Milton was still alive...

TlalocW

[Brigid]

4. George Pullman was a control freak.

When he died, his tomb was encased in tons of concrete and asphalt. The process took two days.It was to prevent the tomb from being desecrated by labor activists. Workers resent being treated like children by their employers. It's that simple.

[cbrer]

5. How about a town owned company? nt