TLDR: We are all living in a coal company town. It's just bigger and gives us the illusion of choice.
I grew up in the coalfields amid burned-out company towns. My morning bus commute to vocational school went through Clinchco (named for Clinchfield Coal Company. The company was later purchased by Pittston, then Alpha Natural Resources, which is now Contura Energy).
In the days of the coal mining towns, companies employed tactics to force more labor out of their employees. All housing was owned by the coal company, as were the doctors and the company store—the only food source for most residents. The companies paid miners in company scrip only redeemable at the company store and for company housing and services. If productivity was down, the company raised rent and food prices.
When more labor was needed, companies recruited from the slums of northern cities and poor European immigrants getting off of ships in Boston and on Ellis Island. They also recruited people of color fleeing sharecropping in the Jim Crow south. Once in Appalachia, companies kept them housed in different sections of their towns, creating what they called a “Judicious Mixture.” They would treat different groups better than others—borrowing tactics from slave-holding plantations of the antebellum south—to keep everyone competing and hating one another.
This corporatocracy was enforced through corrupt law enforcement and privately hired security corporations such as the Baldwin-Felts Agency or the Pinkerton Agency. They created a “mine guard” system that often resembled a paramilitary force. These enforcers maintained compliance with company policies and superseded existing laws. If miners were hurt or killed and couldn't work, their wives and daughters would sell their bodies to mine guards and company management for “Essau” or “Super Scrip,” so as not to be evicted from company housing and to buy food for their children at the company store. (If this sounds familiar, Susan Collins' depiction of District 12 in the Hunger Games was based on historical accuracies from early 20th-century Appalachian coal towns)
Decade after decade, miners and their families did their best to unionize and fight back. They faced barrages of machine gun fire as they slept in tent camps outside the company towns. Despite many losses, they eventually won an end to those abusive company towns. But the coal operators never changed their attitudes. They only grew smarter. They gave small concessions to appease the unions, but miners still mined their coal for them.
Tens of thousands of miners continued to die in mining accidents, explosions, or would slowly suffocate from black lung after years of breathing coal dust. For all of our struggles, all our families won were better wages and working conditions for a few decades. Amid this constant struggle, a century's worth of mining has left an ecological wasteland full of coal mining pollution, economic ruin, and opioid abuse. All that is left is to suffer.
The elite monied class knows the best way to stop a labor uprising. Raise costs on people's basic needs: food, housing, and today—energy. They know to keep people busy but provide them with enough to keep things under control. They have become masters of Panem et Circenses.
Though not as abusive (in many places), the company town still exists in every facet of our lives. Today, we have more choices to entertain ourselves with. We have a choice of company towns to reside in, company stores to shop in, and of course, endless entertainment through television, video games, and the internet.
As I look at what is left of my region, I wonder how much longer it will be before we all wake up and realize the ecological wasteland we will be left with. When will we realize that all we are doing is fighting a neverending battle for better wages and a more comfortable work-life balance as we destroy the only planet we live on?
Food is income. Grow it sustainably.
Housing is a necessity. Build it. Share it.
Energy is a luxury. Conserve it.
Life is precious. Appreciate it—all of it.
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men – 1755