ABSTRACT
The employer provided everything – wages, housing, post office, parks, canteens. Such a model of the ‘company town’, where a single corporation dominates in multiple capacities as employer, landlord, service provider, and quasi-regulator over a dwelling area, has endured across borders and time. It can portray textile mills in 18th century England and coal towns in early 20th century United States just as fittingly as it does today’s ‘supply chain cities’ in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.
From Pullman’s iconic model town in Illinois to Foxconn’s ‘forbidden iPhone city’ in Shenzhen, this Article anchors the business model of company towns as a window into expressions of corporate private governance during pivotal moments of industrialization. Despite the vastly different time and space, these industrial enclaves share some remarkable similarities, motivated by large-scale capital accumulation and demand for efficient labor management. Significantly, each creates a comprehensive corporate control order that extends corporate norms beyond the work space deep into workers’ private lives. But unlike the old towns of the industrializing West, which largely served a single, vertically integrated conglomerate, today’s factory towns are transboundary, interconnected, and designed to take advantage of various legal regimes, most notably trade, tariff, investment, and labor laws. Under the control of transnational, first-tier suppliers, modern towns, more so than ever, act as ‘legal entrepôts’ – made by law and formative of various sources of law, including sub-national, national, and transnational.
In drawing connections between past company towns and today’s factory towns, this Article reveals the physical and legal blueprints of this uniquely potent form of corporate power over the longue durée. This broad view underscores the complex and shifting nature of corporate private governance, including how modern factory towns act as sites of regulatory fragmentation as well as harmonization and contestation of standard settings. At the same time, the transboundary and horizontal linkages among industrial clusters can open up new opportunities for strategic coordination among workers who may be scattered around the world but connected through a global supply base. At a time of changing geopolitics and renewed focus on industrial development, this Article thus offers a timely study on the pathologies of and hopes for modern company towns.
Nguyen, Trang (Mae), Global Company Towns (March 13, 2024), 96 University of Colorado Law Review 75 (2025); Temple University Legal Studies Research Paper No 2024-33.
Leave a Reply