A company town is a place where all or most of the stores and housing are owned by the same company that also serves as the town's main employer. Company towns are often planned with a suite of amenities such as stores, houses of worship, schools, markets and recreation facilities. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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Company towns and the corvee labor system both place a worker daily obligations under a single controlling authority, though the company town control runs through private ownership rather than government compulsion.
The scrip and company-store systems common to company towns frequently produced a de facto debt bondage, keeping workers perpetually indebted to their employer.
Company towns and sharecropping both let an employer control a worker housing and credit alongside the labor relationship itself, deepening dependency well beyond the wage alone.
The company town controlled the wage-labor relationship completely: the employer was also landlord, merchant and often the sole source of usable currency within the town.
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Source Company Town (Wikipedia)Article bodytier 2Quote, Article body
Although many small company towns existed in mining areas of Pennsylvania before the American Civil War, one of the most significant and most substantial early company towns in the United States was Pullman, developed in the 1880s just outside the Chicago city limits.
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Company Town (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationLead sectionQuote, Lead section
A company town is a place where all or most of the stores and housing in the town are owned by the same company that is also the main employer.
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