Is this any different from living on a military base? Government employees get cheap shopping, entertainment, restaurants, social services, and decent neighborhoods with playgrounds and pools. It does seem more noble to be patriotic than loyal to a company, but is it really any different? I rarely hear service men and women complain about base conditions, they're usually fairly nice.
I don't know that much about it, but I've heard more than a few complains that the military treats married servicemen and women so much better than single ones in terms of housing and benefits that it creates a huge incentive to marry pretty much anybody with a pulse just to get those benefits. Naturally this ends in quite a few miserable marriages and messy divorces.
Or rather, the military is the state, always has been, always will be.
It just appears to be a secondary, nested construct because often it outsources many of its non-core competencies to a civil bureaucracy.
For example, you can destroy the infrastructure, diplomatic service, civilian authorities, and civil society of a country, and the military will still collect the taxes and keep approximate order when it benefits by doing so (in fact this has happened rather commonly in history).
But if you get rid of the cops/armies, all the other state systems crash very quickly.
Are you implying that private corporations are more motivated to take advantage of their employees for profit, rather than just trying to keep them happy and productive? I doubt tech companies care much about the profits from these endeavors to risk losing employees through shenanigans. The motivation for both private and military seems to me to just keep happy, committed employees who will be productive for the cause.
"Are you implying that private corporations are more motivated to take advantage of their employees for profit, rather than just trying to keep them happy and productive?"
I'd say yes, of course they are, apart from very few exceptions. Isn't the illegal wage-fixing move by Apple, Intel and Google a prime example of that?
Cynically, wage fixing does keep people happy and productive, because it means they spend less time worrying about how much more they could make at some other company.
DoD members get screwed as well, as seen in several high profile instances, but you can't just point to a couple cases and think that indicates a trend. I'm sure surveys of large tech companies and the DoD would show that professionals choose their current employer because they're treated well. We have enough mobility in this country that large scale mistreatment would be met with mass exodus and ultimate failure of the employer.
The economy's only booming for those of us in tech. That's why there's all these wildcat labor actions, you see, which have finally resulted in wages growing across-the-board for the first time in decades.
The article mentions those old timey company towns cutting pay but keeping rent and food prices the same. What's to stop a company like Facebook from doing the same? Sure, they have no reason to do that now while the cash is rolling in and everything is gravy. But what about when the market turns and profits start to shrink?
I think it's very dangerous for the same for-profit company to control both people's pay and their rent and other living expenses.
People are only going to leave if they can get an equivalent job at a competitor. If and when the current tech bubble bursts, these companies will all have a hiring freeze at the same time, just as they're all in a hiring frenzy at the same time right now. We live in a feast-or-famine economy, and we tend to forget past famines while we're feasting.
If a company controls your paycheck, it's hard enough to leave. If they control both your paycheck and your housing, it's much harder to leave. If you want to leave and you put in your two weeks' notice, are they going to respond with notice that you're being evicted? So now you have to handle a job change and a sudden move at the same time?
Sudden? If you live in a company-owned house, would you really expect to stay after quitting?
If you want to leave, you plan your move along with your change of job. If for some particular reason you may think this will be exceedingly problematic, you can move before quitting.
But surely profits gained from a marketable product are >> than profits gained from cutting corners at employee expense? Risking the loss of top talent would seem to be a losing strategy.
