One of the hardest things to do is distinguish truth from propaganda. And in no place is this more true than the oft derided "company town".
I've visited several oil camps in the Sumatra jungle that looked like small south Florida towns replete with golf courses (mandatory closing at dusk due to tiger infestation), supermarkets, schools. Indeed I lived in the Phillips 66 compound in Abu Dhabi where the company provided the housing, power, water, roads, and schools.
It wasn't a rip off. And neither are company towns. Instead they are enticements to encourage skilled labor to live in harsh places. Another area where rhetoric and reality diverge.
Take company stores. Why did mining companies often own the town store? The standard answer: to squeeze every nickel from the workers so they would “owe their soul to the company store.” But that lyrical argument makes no sense and the truth is actually closer to the opposite. The mining towns were isolated geographically but they weren’t isolated from the national labor market. The number of workers in these towns moved up and down in response to the price of coal and the workers often traveled long-distances to work in the mines, sometimes from other states or other countries. The company towns were isolated not because the workers couldn’t get out but because few people wanted to live where coal was abundant. As a result, workers had to be enticed to travel to and to live in these towns. Oil rigs are similarly isolated today and once on board the workers have nowhere to go but the company restaurant, the company theater and the company gym but that hardly means that the workers are exploited.
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