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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder if there is an opportunity for western companies to build factories on a smaller scale to Foxconn where employees live on campus. Wages could be low, but with basic services provided it could be a chance for low wage earners to save up some money. The costs might be too high for it to work on that scale though.

How quickly we forget history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

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I was gonna say, didn't this lead to exploitation and almost slave-labor before?

I mean with some strong regulation things might be different, but with the political landscape as it is I don't think it would work out.

The Netherlands has several 'Company neighbourhoods', I was raised in one. They were typically built before the second world war and they were actually meant to 'enable the working class'. Build quality was good and had quite some space for the time. Layout of the neighbourhood was not dense but left spaces open for nature and play.

Facilities included schools, sports accomodation etc. PSV, a dutch premier league football team is a project of Phillips the former electronics giant. PSV -> Phillips Sport Vereniging.

And Phillips built neighbourhoods, schools and public swimming pools too.

Ah well ... sigh ( I was not raised in a Phillips neighbourhood btw ).

Not always. For example the village built up by the Cadbury family in Bournville was designed to favour the wellbeing and living standards of their workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville

Exactly. But it is always interesting to me that when the cost of living is high, and a job doesn't pay enough to afford to live near it, people think it would be "helpful" if the employer offered discounted or free housing. The alternative is to think it is "horrible" that they don't pay you enough to live there.

In the transaction though its the 'job' that is the good thing and employers (in spite of their whining about worker shortages) are able to get people to work at those insufficient wages, and so they continue to pay them.

Unionization broke that cycle once, I'm curious to see if a technology worker union emerges from this growing level of pain.

An aside that's probably relevant here is how the welfare state here deals with the unemployed: if you refuse a job offer, you cease being eligible for any welfare. This can (and does at times) push people to accept jobs where their cost of commuting takes up almost their entire income and leaves them worse off than the relatively small amount they were getting as welfare.

In a sense, you can be pushed to accept a job at an infeasibly low wage because the alternative is having no income at all.

One might think that the welfare system enables those low wages. Literally an offer they can't turn down makes negotiation difficult.

Does FoxConn have company scrip? As far as I know, you can take the money you make at FoxConn and save it until you find another job. Or send it to your family to support them.

Company scrip served to make it so you could never save up money to leave, which was the biggest problem.

You could achieve the same just by artificially raising the cost of living through rent and utility fees.

It can be non-awful if the founders are Methodist chocolate manufacturers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville

But more often it goes wrong, like Fordlandia.

Just because company towns didn't work once doesn't mean it can never work. How about a SpaceX Mars town? :)

Where strikes are punished by turning off the air.

Was this a subtle reference to the movie "Total Recall"?

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