(4 of 4)
While most companies do all they can to help with recreational and cultural projects, management takes pains to avoid dominating local governments or creating a feeling of passive dependence on company paternalism. When Shell built a new $75 million refinery in little Anacortes, Wash, last year, employees were advised to ''be helpful but go slow" in civic activities. A company executive explained. "We were very careful not to lead residents to believe we were going to be the great white father." Said Editor Wallie Funk of the Anacortes American Bulletin: "Only a few of us suffered any Shell shock."
No Mortgage on the Soul
Management's imprint on community affairs is still apparent in some old established company towns. In Dow Chemical's Midland there are no hard liquor bars because "the Dow family wouldn't like it." In some company towns, particularly in the South, management frankly uses paternalism as a weapon against unionism.
But the dignity-crushing subservience that once bound mill hand to boss has almost disappeared from the U.S. company town. Industry is generally aware that output will be consistently higher in bright, well-run communities where employees are proud to live and work. Civic leaders, for their part, find that industry not only brings in new payrolls and tax revenue but good neighbors as well. Today's company town citizen owes responsibility to his community and his job. But the company holds no mortgage on his soul.
* Which often charged such exorbitant prices that Pennsylvania mineworkers in 1902 accused the coal operators of making profits "not only from mining coal but by mining miners." Many companies fired employees who shopped at independent stores. One of the worst company storekeepers: John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. refused to give miners the right to shop where they chose until after a strike in 1913.