Free The Company Town by Hardy Green

constructing Sparrows Point on a grid of rectangular blocks, with streets named simply for letters of the alphabet, the company allocated houses according to one’s place in the corporate pyramid. Avenues A through D, closest to the water, were for executives; Avenues E through F were for foremen and skilled workers; and remaining lettered streets were for workers of lesser rank. Homes became smaller and neighborhoods denser as the alphabet progressed.
    The company owned all buildings directly and rented them out to employees, meaning that, of course, tenants had to leave if they lost or gave up their jobs. The houses were substantial and inexpensive, renting for between $5.50 and $12 a month. Once again, of course, the company’s primary housing concern was for managers and skilled workers: On the far north side of the peninsula was a group of shanties for unmarried immigrants and single black men—six-room affairs housing up to four men per room, with no running water, and privies out back.
    There were two schoolhouses in town, one for whites and another for blacks. Seven churches were present on land rented from the company for $1 per year, and no alcohol was allowed in the town.
    Although many of the residences in Sparrows Point were above average for a company town, there were similarities to coal-mining communities. Rents, for example, were deducted from pay. There were no independent stores in Sparrows Point, only a company store where credit was extended in the form of scrip. Company executives got stock in the store and bonuses based on its earnings, which ran between 10 percent and 12 percent a year.
    And in what was standard practice in steel facilities, the plant ran long hours: The day shift was eleven hours, followed by a thirteen- or fourteen-hour
night shift and a twenty-four-hour swing shift on Sunday. (Every two weeks, the shifts reversed so that those working days went onto nights and vice versa; on the day of the shift turn, half of the workers had to pull a twenty-four-hour stint.) There were no vacations, and two unpaid holidays per year. The Sparrows Point facility was a self-declared open shop—no union allowed.
    By 1910, 4,000 men were employed there, 75 percent in the works and the rest in the shipyard. It had already become the largest employer in Maryland. But following a drop in global sales of rails, and drastic cuts in the workforce, the company sold out to Bethlehem Steel in 1916. Bethlehem president Charles M. Schwab, who’d come to that company only a year after resigning from U.S. Steel, saw Britain, France, and Russia as profitable wartime clients and courted them even when the United States was supposed to be a neutral power. Munitions and armor-plate sales abroad allowed Schwab to transform Sparrows Point into a much larger works, employing 12,500 men at its peak.
    Wartime production demands, it turned out, weren’t altogether to the liking of steel executives. President Woodrow Wilson’s National War Labor Board sought a détente with organized labor and began proceedings against Bethlehem Steel, forbidding it from blocking union activities and requiring the organization of shop committees. In response, the company began an employee-representation plan much like the one at Colorado Fuel and Iron. Employees elected representatives who met annually with top management; elected plant committees met six times a year to discuss such issues as transportation, the company bonus system, safety, housing, and grievances. Management, however, could simply terminate any grievance.
    Altogether, the Sparrows Point formula seemed to work even without offering home ownership, which seemed to be a key to worker contentment in Vandergrift. When pent-up wartime demands and grinding, dangerous work shifts combined to explode in the form of a national 1919 steel strike, only five hundred Sparrows Point men walked out. 16

    During the 1910s, the steel industry seemed to arrive at