My mother's father grandfather and my father's grandfather both worked in Scottish coal mines and lived in company owned row housing.

The company paid a wage, but if you were needed for overtime, that was not compensated [1]. The working conditions were incredibly dangerous and many of the minors, including my mother father, died early and horribly from the condition caused by inhalation of coal dust. The company charged so much for the row housing that most of the meagre pay you got went back to the company.

The only good part of that horror was the reality that the miners and their families stuck together and tried to help each other in tough times.

This industry is one of the ones that were major causes for worker safety reforms and for unions to become present and strong. 

-----
[1] My mother was sent down to the mine to deliver a lunch her mother prepared for her father who was working his THIRD consecutive shift. The mine manager could not give her money (overtime was not compensated) but he did send her home with....a cabbage. Given how desperate things were, my mother's mother was pleased to have it.

TomB

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 2:27 PM Jeff Zeitlin <xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com> wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2020 10:13:34 -0700 (PDT), Thomas RUX <xxxxxx@comcast.net>
wrote:

>IIRC on a small scale governance by company/corporation would be something
>like the early coal mining industry. The company/corporation owned the
>houses, stores, schools, churches, etc. The employees had no say in their
>pay, working hours, benefits, or working conditions. As long as the
>company/corporation did not break local or, in the case of the USA, federal
>laws they could and did get away with a lot of shenanigans.

Even if they were breaking State or Federal law, companies with 'company
towns' were often able to avoid legal problems, provided that they were
able to

   * keep the law from noticing it - one way of doing this, unfortunately,
     was often to silence the potential troublemakers, in ways designed to
     cow others;

   * co-opt the law into supporting the company, or bribing them to take no
     action;

   * make sure that they had enough power, politically and sometimes in a
     paramilitary sense, to keep the state from interfering.

If you've read the Sherlock Holmes stories, you can get a good idea of the
sort of thing that _could_ be "company government" by reading _The Valley
of Fear_, specifically the "flashback" portions that take place in
Pennsylvania coal mining country.

Note to tc: FWIW, I've never seen anything either way on this theory, but I
could easily see that portion of _The Valley of Fear_ as an attempt by ACD
to write a detective story that *wasn't* a Holmes. That it got wrapped into
a Holmes story suggests that perhaps his editor/publisher said "Sherlock,
Arthur, the public wants Sherlock"...


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