By Prof. Aparajith Ramnath
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| Prof. Aparajith Ramnath |
Facebook’s plans
to build a 394-flat residential complex for its staff in California, and the ensuing discussions in the media, raise an
interesting historical question. Why do companies set up townships?
There are strategic
reasons: the seventeenth-century walled cities of Fort St. George (Madras) and
Fort William (Calcutta) were established by the East India Company as trading
outposts, racially exclusive enclaves for its functionaries, and barracks for
its troops.
Logistics also play a part: around a century ago, the township of Jamshedpur
was built to house the employees of the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO), as
the ideal site for the works (close to iron ore, coal deposits and running
water) was far from any urban centre.
But history
also suggests that companies set up townships to streamline their workforces. A
recent study shows that the immigrant
workers pouring into the Ford Motor Company in the early twentieth century were
encouraged to leave their allegedly squalid ethnic settlements in nearby
Detroit and move into company-organised housing in Dearborn, Michigan (where
Ford had its plant). They were put to school to learn English and dissolve their
ethnic identities as far as possible, thus becoming American.
In Jamshedpur,
ingenious techniques were used to promote efficiency. In his 1943 memoir, John
Keenan, an early General Manager of TISCO, recounts how a race course was
created to channel the energies of the steel operators. Earlier they used to
disappear to the nearest city for a flutter on their days off; now, ‘[w]ith
racing in their own backyard … the boys stayed at home and made steel. And as
the output of steel increased, wages rose and big bonuses became the order of
the day ... Heavy drinking ceased.’
Townships also
tend to reinforce, subtly or otherwise, the hierarchies of the workplace. A
colleague who grew up in an Indian mining township in the 1970s and ’80s recalls
that the distinction between ‘officers’ and ‘workers’ was expressed in many
ways: not only did they have separate recreation clubs; their children went to
the same schools in separate buses.
But do such objectives
still hold true in the age of flat organisations, open-plan workplaces and
air-conditioned offices? Yes, albeit in modified form. They may not be
residential, but anybody who has worked in the IT ‘campuses’ of Bangalore,
Chennai or California is familiar with the feeling of being in a world within a
world. Whether by design or otherwise, catering, comfortable lounges, and facilities
for sport and leisure encourage the twenty-first-century employee to extend his
or her hours at work. Some companies take day-to-day errands, like paying
utility bills, off employees’ hands; others provide washing machines at work; yet
others clean
employees’ homes for free. In this context, we may conclude that developments
like Facebook’s proposed residential complex would not represent a major
change. They would only confirm what is already true: that the company
continues to loom large in the life of the employee, whether in the knowledge
economy or the industrial.
Aparajith Ramnath is a Visiting Assistant Professor of
Humanities & Liberal Arts in Management at IIMK Kozhikode.
