In seeking to challenge what he describes as ‘a stereotyped view of company towns’, Neil White presents a rich history of two such towns: his hometown of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada, and Mt Isa in Queensland, Australia. Corner Brook is a ‘paper-making’ town, and Mt Isa is an ‘outback mining town’. In particular, the book sets out to highlight company-town differences and therein to ‘add new dimensions to the understanding of power and resistance, negotiation and hegemony in company towns’ (p. 6). To this end, detailed local histories are offered encompassing the messiness of industrial development in each locale along with the complexities of planning and building a particular company town and the emergence in each case of ‘fringe’ towns. A large portion of the book is thereafter devoted to the multitude of activities and influences that constitute the specific tenor of civic life and individual experience in each town.
Not surprisingly, Chapters 1 and 2 examine the corporate history leading to the development of each town and informing their various structures. Both chapters provide a powerful, although somewhat laboured, sense of the uncertain, non-rational and fractured nature of industrial development in each town, emphasising the intersections of chance, individual determination, global forces and local specificities. Chapter 3 turns to the planning of each company town, offering a fascinating account of differing ideological underpinnings and influences, the role of the personal desires of company chairmen and other leaders, the import of the materiality of the resource in question, and geographical and financial concerns. This chapter makes an important contribution to the study of company towns by way of its focus not only on the company-controlled, planned portions of each town but also on the unplanned but deeply interconnected ‘fringe’ towns. Of likely interest to labour scholars is the complex history and spatial dynamics of these fringe towns in relation to the management (including retention) of labour. These are traced across changing circumstances including shifting state and industry agendas.
In its exploration of ‘contrasting labour histories’, Chapter 4 might well be of most interest to labour scholars. However, it is precisely the interrelations of the vagaries of industrial development, the particularities of the planning undertaken in each town and the specificities of the fringe communities along with the innumerable everyday acts that constitute each town as encompassed in the rest of the book that enable a nuanced understanding of labour relations in each town. The chapter argues that a local recognition of class division played a strong role in shaping confrontational labour relations in Mt Isa, whereas in Corner Brook, most workers were not militant and preferred negotiation to threats. Overall, the chapter presents a detailed history of complex manoeuvring and bargaining processes as unions, the company and the state, each attempted to press or gain an advantage in distinctive ways in each town. The particular value is in the historical breadth.
Chapters 5 and 6 engage with ‘the small autonomies that shaped daily life’ (p. 131). In examining ‘Civic Life and Resident-Company negotiation’, Chapter 5 focuses on ‘community life’ and the roles played by small businesses, municipal governance and formal community groups and recreation in the development of local identities. Small businesses – described as ‘the first exemplars of an emerging local identity’ (p. 132) – are a central concern along with the role of Churches, access to education and health care, infrastructure and company-organised formal recreation. White argues that in Corner Brook ‘negotiation and compromise’ was used to establish ‘reciprocal obligations’ between the corporation and residents in the company-planned Townsite, and that this ‘carried over into the fringe towns’ (p. 132). In Mt Isa, ‘the realities of the outback made Isa’s pioneers cagey, resourceful, and stubbornly independent’ (p. 146), and this, together with the primacy of class interests, led to oppositional relations. The chapter provides examples of interesting alliances among unlikely groups, as exemplified in the 1929 ‘beer strike’ (p. 151). Miners protested against the high price of alcohol, available from only two hotels in Mt Isa, by instituting what turned out to be a year-long boycott. Company managers and the police force supported the boycott because it increased productivity and reduced crime. Business owners too supported boycotting miners, for example, by offering discounted services, presumably in expectation that the boycott meant more money would be spent on other commodities.
In Chapter 6, White surveys ‘collective daily experiences’ or ‘the tones of daily life’ in each town. Tone, he argues (p. 160), is constructed relationally through comparison to other places: Corner Brook compared favourably to life in ‘Newfoundland’s poor rural outports’, whereas Mt Isa ‘did not come off well’ when gauged against coastal towns or ‘bastions of labour power like Broken Hill’. The underlying argument is that the everyday things that inhabitants did to make life pleasant – the ‘innumerable small autonomies’ (p. 160) they enacted – preserved corporate authority. Inhabitants of Corner Brook are shown to have hybridised traditional self-provisioning and rural recreation activities and thus were able to develop a sense of self and place separate to the company narrative and escape, briefly, the alienation of industrial labour. On the other hand, in Mt Isa, where ‘toughness and creativity’ are ‘important personal attributes’ (p. 168), the presence of a large transient population and a pervasive sense of impermanence ‘led permanent and transient residents to develop different kinds of small autonomies’ spanning ‘gardening to casual visits and parties to binge drinking and casual violence’ as the means of temporary escape.
The chapter richly develops the concept of ‘fringe’ towns as ‘safety valves’ drawing out a range of nuances in the relationships between company-planned and fringe areas. In doing so, it offers insights into inequalities and poverty experienced by fringe residents around access to education. It further explores the control and/prohibition of alcohol and the very different tenor of the relationship between local residents and the corporation articulated in Corner Brook and Mt Isa. Much attention is given to imbalances in the number of women and men in each town. In places, this leads to a reductive account of women as ‘God’s police’ (Reference SummersSummers, 2002 [1975]). For example, White associates the ‘prevalence of women’ in Corner Brook with low levels of ‘extreme homo-sociable behaviour’ (p. 162) and, conversely, in Mt Isa with high levels of this behaviour. In this way, women’s company-town contributions and subordinations are erased in favour of reproducing a gender stereotype.
This book, in its rich detail, has much to offer those interested in understanding ‘how global capital assumes different forms at the local level’ (p. 183). As White suggests, these local divergences ‘matter’ particularly if we are to understand the innumerable intersections of ‘power, agency and subordination’ which shape society and everyday lives (p. 187). While women do occasionally appear in the histories of these towns presented by White, much more attention to company-town women is needed if we are to attain this fuller understanding not only of company towns but also of power, agency and subordination.
