When has this specific thing happened before?
And, to be clear, these restrictions would apply to someone who was still an employee and wanted to sell, not just to someone who wasn't an employee anymore. The restrictions are because of the financial considerations being offered at the purchase of the home, not because of the employment relationship.
I don't think it's great for competition since smaller companies won't be able to offer the same incentive, but it does create downward pressure on the housing market and at least the employees end up owning a major asset.
Another way to look at it is the company providing enough total compensation for their employees to buy a house. It almost seems unnaturally altruistic which kind of freaks me out. Lol.
So employee lose what exactly ? (I assume) they wouldn't be able to mortgage a property at market rate without it
> If housing wasn't increasingly difficult to come by, this wouldn't even be on the table as a compelling offer.
Well, the city doing exact same thing would certainly be preferable, but this is still helping the problem
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
Generally exploitive features include: an exclusive buying right by a certain party (allowing them to set prices), incidentals and necessities of life only being purchased from a certain party, mortgaging future assets in exchange for current goods/services (often with steep or complex credit terms), and restrictions on free sale of assets to arbitrary third parties (preventing price discovery and realization of fair market value).
As GP observed, these specific modern agreements generally avoid those pitfalls.
That’s why I asked for when this specific thing had happened before, rather than “when has an employer ever done a bad thing”
https://askus.thehenryford.org/faq/169797
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
The Ford Homes are not to be confused with Fordlandia, Henry Ford's disastrous attempt to build a utopian rubber plant in the Amazon rainforest.
Now, none of this (and even my original post) means it's necessarily a bad idea—but that, the actual history and the way we read that situation in fiction, is why people are inclined to immediately have a bad reaction to such a plan.
Companies built worker housing (and charged for it), paid workers in scrip that could only be redeemed at the company store. It became de facto slavery.