We All Live in a Company Town Now. The Labor Movement Can Lead the Way Out.
Private profiteers have concentrated their grip over real estate to such an extent that virtually every American lives in a company town now. Unions from all sectors need to wage campaigns for housing policies that break the vise grip of real-estate elites.
A new luxury condo building goes up in New York, the most rent-burdened city in the United States. (Angus Mordant / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
We all know how bad the housing crisis is. Rising rents, rampant speculation, and skyrocketing eviction and homelessness rates paint a grim picture. Beneath the surface is a more malignant driver of this crisis: the speculative private market, which has concentrated its grip over real estate to such an extent that virtually every American lives in a company town now.
As educators, we have witnessed this housing crisis not only be a source of stress and instability for ourselves and our coworkers, but also uproot our students from schools — away from their friends, teachers, counselors, and neighborhood communities. The root of this injustice is the private market’s monopoly on housing construction and ownership. Unions from all sectors — education, service, manufacturing, and especially the building trades — need to unite and campaign for housing policies that break the monopoly of the private market.
Modern Company Towns
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, company towns were areas where workers from one or a handful of companies lived in housing owned and operated by those companies. The result was that companies wielded exorbitant power over their workers, as they controlled not only their wages but their homes.
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