Human resource management is one of the most important aspects of any enterprise in today’s business world. Millions of dollars are invested in hiring, training, and maintaining employees as it is now clearly understood that the level of success of any enterprise is largely determined by the nature and status of its human resource. This idea is not limited to our times, towards the end of the 19th century; companies needed human resource more that we do today and would go out of their way to get the same (Abramitzky, 2006). One ingenious way of acquiring human resource was indented servants while one of the very first human resource maintenance stratagems was the company town. Whereas the ideas vary in many ways, they are much more similar than the initial impression may portray.
Indentured Servants
The American dream preceded the US as a country; however, many of those who heard about the American dream of making it big in the new world could not afford to pay their way from Europe to the Americas. At the same time, the affluent who wanted to invest in the new world either in farming on in industries were in need of human labor. This led to an agreement between the poor in Europe, more so Britain and Germany, who desired to work in the Americas and their intended employers to exchange freight into the Americas for the duration of employment that would enable the employees to pay back the employers for the aforesaid freight. Towards the end of the 19th Century, about half of European immigrants to Europe had traveled under the terms of indentured servitude (Abramitzky, 2006).
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Whereas this began as a noble commercial idea, most of those who signed the agreements of indenture ended up suffering permanent servitude in the Americas, doing hard labor under difficult circumstances that were akin to slavery. To begin with, the employers, who assumed the position master, would make all the rules and the indentured servants were bound to honor them. Secondly, the masters were within their right to sell and/or transfer the indentured services of their employees to other settlers which means that an indentured servant would be transferred from master to master without any reference to them and without taking part in the agreement between there former and future masters (Watson, 2014).
Finally, the masters were within the right to employ corporal punishment against indentured servants and if any of them tried to escape, they would be hunted down and delivered back to their masters. It is also worthy of notice that at some point, children would be kidnapped in Europe and shipped to the Americas under the guise on indentured servants (Abramitzky, 2006).
Company Town
A company town is an area where all the land, commerce, and social amenities are controlled by a specific company and is designed to be utilized by the employees of one particular company. The initial idea behind Company times was a very noble one; big employers realized that the circumstances in which their employees lived had a great effect in their efficiency and capacity to work. They therefore decided to build their own form of servant quarters where they would create better living conditions for their employees with better houses, schools for their children, churches and social amenities in a bid to create better lives for them so that they could become better employees (Vergara & Dinius, 2011).
With time however, this noble idea started becoming a form of exploitation by employers for employee. Due to labor relations issue more so with the advent of labor movements, big employers started building their company towns in segregated places where their employees would not be interfered with. The distance and inability to leave due to lack of contemporary transport, the employer was also in charge of all the basic and secondary amenities available to them to the employees and could use this as tools for exploitation and control. Indeed, some employers stopped using money to pay their employees and paid them using bills that could only be used in exchange for services within the company town thus enhancing the exploitation and control (Vergara & Dinius, 2011).
Comparison between Indentured Servants and Company towns
The two concepts were similar in the fact that they were both created by and centered on employers and targeted on potential or actual employees. They are also similar in the fact that they both arose towards the end of the 19th century when the US was beginning to develop rapidly both in farming and industry. Finally, they were also similar in the fact that they involved predominantly poor manual laborers vis-à-vis rich land owners and/or industrialists (Vergara & Dinius, 2011; Watson, 2014).
The main differences lie in the fact that Indentured Servants owed their employers for their freight from Europe while the residents of company towns were free employees. Secondly, the employees in company town were not subject to extreme treatment including corporal punishment or controls such us who to marry and when to have children as were the indentured servants who were in almost all intents and purposes treated as the slaves they used to work alongside (Watson, 2014).
What went wrong in both noble ideas
Sir Ferdinand Dalberg-Acton is reputed for having stated that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believe that both the indentured servants and company towns were noble ideas one meant to acquire human resource from Europe and the other one to create a better life for employment (Abramitzky, 2006; Watson, 2014). However, the circumstances in both instances gave too much unregulated power to the employers with the end result for both being that the vested power transformed to noble contemporary ideas into tools of exploitation, control and servitude. Some of the indentured ended up becoming slaves of their masters and some of the employees who found themselves boxed inside Company towns ended up slaving for their employers
On the other hand, not all the indentured servants were ill-treated and ended up becoming slaves, some of them were actually set free after their terms of services were completed and who became productive citizens who could have indentured servants of their own: in the same way, some company towns were actually a success story where employees were treated well and the towns flourished which is evidenced by the fact that some company towns are still in existence today (Vergara & Dinius, 2011; Watson, 2014).
Personal opinion about the two concepts
Both indentured servitude and company towns and the pertaining evils thereto are well kept secrets and form part of the buried aspects of history in a country that is seemingly so proud of its heritage. Indeed, I erstwhile was unaware that both this concepts existed in the 19th Century United States and was only aware of the contemporary company towns in Germany including the Audi town in Ingolstadt, Germany and the Volkswagen town at Wolfsburg. Perhaps the main reason that these issues have been maintained as a secret was because the two ideas were abused as when talked about, their negative elements would outweigh the positive ones.
Conclusion
The beauty of democracy lies in its capacity to spread absolute power to the people who have the ability to check the leadership and even remove government when they do not agree with it. The ideas of indentured servitude and company town would have worked if an element of democracy had been injected into them. They should also be a lesson to the contemporary world that despite the purity and goodness of any idea, if it places too much unchecked powers on the minority, it its bound to be abused and will eventually go wrong and end up being a buried part of history in the same way that this two wonderful ideas have been buried.
References
Abramitzky, R., & Braggion, F. (2006). Migration and human capital: Self-selection of indentured servants to the Americas. Journal of Economic History, 66 (4), 882-905.
Vergara, A., & Dinius, O. J. (2011). Company towns in the Americas: Landscape, power, and working-class communities . Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press
Watson, A. D. (2014). A consideration of European indentured servitude in colonial North Carolina. North Carolina Historical Review, 91 (4), 381-406
