Yeah, they’re gonna lift the working class right into a company town.
Only rich people would think this was a good idea.
Learn your history, people!
We DID this shit- for DECADES. It was fucking awful. Companies paid people in “scrip” which was only good for use at the Company Store. So effectively, the company got your money coming and going, and they didn’t pay you at all. And the longer it went on, the less likely you were to have savings that could have helped you move away or get a different job.
I’ve already seen one ad trying very sneakily to promote the idea of “AmazonBucks”, including giving them to workers as rewards, or instead of things like healthcare, sick days, and PTO.
Here’s your reminder that scrip is fucking illegal, that company towns are always a shit idea that should stay dead and buried, and that if unions didn’t work? Every big company out there wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to destroy them.
#UnionStrong #SolidarityForever
We even have old songs about how this is a bad idea
You know how shitty it is that your health care insurance is directly tied to your job? Imagine if your housing worked the same way. Your husband or wife dies in a warehouse accident and you have 30 days to find a new place to live.
I live in the North of England, which, because Londoners are inherently bigots, is the middle of England. We had Mill towns: Some mill owner with Notions would build a Model town or a set of terraces and lure people in from the smallholdings to work in the mill.
And then they’d own you: You’d buy your bread at the company store at their price, you’d pay them rent, be fined for being late, for dropping your work, for missing quota… If you were super unlucky you’d have to use the company coin, which couldn’t be spent anywhere else. Very EA. You’d get a half day off on Sunday to got to church but you’d work 7 days a week. Your kids would get a few hours school, because some interfering politician had made a law saying children had to have an education, then they’d be expected to show for work.
They’d have to crawl under the looms, while they were in operation and scavenge thread and chaff. Meaning the foreman would occasionally haul you off the machine you were working on and tell you your kid just got scalped because the machine caught her hair and ate the top of her head. So sad, back to work, PS you’re being fined a penny for not being at your station.
The soot would get everywhere: We were still power washing it off inb teh 90s. Stuff that didn’t get it is still stained black. The dust from the fabric would give you Black Lung, and you’d retire at 50, having been deaf for 30 years, hacking up chunks of lung, and be dead by 55. Then the company would charge your family to bury you. And yes: they’d throw them out of the tiny house that shared a toilet with 20 other families.
Oh yes: The shop floor was so loud it’d deafen the workers, and they’d all be lip reading and using ad-hoc local sign language to talk. You know that running joke about OSHA being written in blood? Yeah. It was.
So here’s the interesting part. You know who dug us out of this corporate hell?
Quakers.
They took offense at all of this and started showing up, running Co-Op shops. They did the same as the Corporations: Everyting you had to buy, or wanted, was at the Co-Op. Houses (One of the biggest mortgage lenders was a Co-operative bank until Capitalism happened to it), food, clothes, funerals, furniture and banking. You put your wages in to the Co-Op and they’d let you buy everything on lay-away.
And that helped break the Mill’s monopoly.
And they also made… chocolate.
The Quakers came to the conclusion that Chocolate was morally correct: It cheered you up, was nourishing, and had no real drawbacks (Hey! Look, white people thinking - They never looked too hard into where cocao was coming from or what the conditions were like. If you’re feeling too happy and cheerful go look up the Belgian Congo some time.)
Anyway, you still find these weird little Yorkshire towns with these huge Mill factory buildings, sitting right next to a chocolate factory: Rowntrees (Bought by Nestlé), Mackintoshs, and Cadburys were all Quaker owned co-operative factories with on-site showers, and profit sharing.
Then Capitalism noticed and ate them, yum yum.
Anyway, point being is that there’s a working model for how to wreck a Corporation Town: You clone thier operation with a non-profit or Co-Op. They provide the same products and services that Corporations provide, but they put the money back into the pockets of the people, they circulate money instead of accumulating it.
I’m salty about this topic because I live here. I’ve worked in the Industrial Museum, met the survivors of the Mills (Old age takes no prisoners) and watched the literal colour of my home change from soot black to creamy brown stone, lived in the Mill terraces, watched Nestlé wipe out an entire company and squat in it’s corpse while slowly degrading the products to pump up the profits at the consumer’s expense and of course run slavery plantations.
Anyway: TL:DR Company towns are slavery and always have been.
As a prompt Danny after he enters Gotham for any suddenly starts growing again for the first time since the portal incident and his body instead of slowly again decides to catch up all the missing years of growing at once so Danny goes from still looking 14 to suddenly having his father's height and looking his actual age.
Since his death, Danny hasn’t really… Grown. His parents think he’s a late bloomer, that he’ll grow later in life. But it’s been four years since he’s died and he hasn’t grown a single inch in that time.
Frostbite is kind enough to tell me that… Well… He’s stuck.
He’s stuck in this form until something affects his physical form. Amity, even though it’s considered the most haunted place in earth, doesn’t have enough ambient ectoplasm for Danny. There are too many ghosts from the realm that feed of it, too many nevermores that need it to exist. Amity feeds it’s ghosts but it doesn’t have enough for a halfa like him.
When he moved to Gotham for the aerospace program (plus the scholarship) he doesn’t expect much from it. People still question him about his age, it almost ends with him flinging his ID and birth certificate on people and cussing them out on his height.
One under-appreciated breed of fic writer are the ones who hyperfocus on logistics to the exclusion of all canon shortcuts, and thus usually strike upon an awesome way to flesh out the worldbuilding or characters.
Like, I’m not necessarily talking realism here since often it’s still pretty far from realistic, but more like, “someone has to be running spies in this fantasy kingdom, and we’ve seen the whole royal court, so which background character is it? How does that change these three major interactions?” Or “real life historical nobility did in fact have some things to do that were like jobs, how does this human disaster cope with running an estate?” Or “there’s no reason for a sci-fi robot detective to know how to whitewater kayak, where’d she learn?” Or “if this guy is serving the emperor directly he has to be way high up in the space empire servant hierarchy, why is he doing this menial task for someone else? What’s his motive? Does he perhaps have the secret space telepathy?”
Anyway I’m always DELIGHTED to find a fic or writer who asks these questions because the fics themselves are universally bangers.
person who knows how logistical things works has picked up the cannon, hefted it thoughtfully, and put a single chalk mark precisely on the problem.
Jason: Y'know, I was actually a ghost for a while before I was revived
Dick: *eye twitching* Is that so?
Jason: *smirking* Yeah.
Dick: That’s so- interesting! I’ll be right back! *slams the bathroom door in his face*
Dick, whisper screaming into his phone:LESLIE, I DON’T NEED THE ANTIPSYCHOTICS, I WASN’T HALLUCINATING JASON THAT WAS GENUINELY JUST HIS GHOST-
Jason, who only ever haunted Dick a couple days because he realized that Dick didn’t seem to care about his death and thought Dick was only upset because Jason might’ve seen something embarrassing about him as a ghost: ?!?!?
