Honestly, give me the company town, the job for life, the fat pension, the regular promotions, the company schools, the company scholarships to send your kids to university and I will live next door to whoever you want.
Either a portion of each employees pay could fund all of this or since the company is providing everything then we could just do without pay entirely. Not sure which method is best really.
Not sure if this is a great example from history. But my 87 year old grandmother still receives a monthly pension check from IBM from my late grandfather who passed away 6 years ago and retired over 30 years ago.
I'm sure IBM wouldn't be making these payments if they had any other option. I think the answer to your question is "because they are obligated to" via contracts signed with employees (and ex-employees, and even deceased employees).
Not to mention that IBM has been dying for a decade+. I certainly would not expect them to make good on any decent size DB pension in a few decades, and unless you are part of a politically connected group, you may or may not get fully bailed out by the feds (see General Motors pension renegotiations in 2008).
See also multi employer pension plans which have crazy regulations where if one employer fails, the other employers gets to pick up the tab.
https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/the-american-res...
Functionally, the consumer has the same problem: competition isn't giving them alternative choices and variety, policy and options are mandated to them. Providers may find school canteens too expensive so they close them, the one who thinks an opportunity may open one but be forced to charge a fee too high for participants to consider so ultimately lunches get packed anyways. In theory the market dictates these things from consumer consensus but consumer consensus is really just some degree of a manipulated majority opinion over w minitory. In practice I don't care who dictates it, my voice (dollar in this case) doesn't seem to matter all that much in contexts without healthy competition.
There's definitely some sort of threshold level of actual competition (however we define that) that has to exist to create a landscape of options for the consumer. As time progresses, the argument for private enterprise grows weaker, in my opinion. The solution is for markets to become less anti-competitive, to allow real competition (not sure how we achieve this). An issue is, no one wants to do this and is incentivized to be anti-competitive in every way they can.
The mine was originally owned by a group that started in the area so they had incentives to make the area great for the employees. Which they did, my grandfather and father got great paying jobs that allowed them to support their families.
But then a massive mining company came in and bought majority shares in the mine and they have been scraping these benefits ever since.
My point is, you never know what's going to happen. So don't get to attached to these benefits. For most places that's alright because there are other opportunities, but in a mining town there generally is one employer.