Why do you trust the company will continue to provide said benefits? Someone new could come in and say, "hmm, let's raise the rent on the main street, close school canteens, add a co pay element on the universities..."

What's to prevent that in a slightly less monopolized system? In some cases, players in a market may all even independently arrive at the same solution and decide not to undercut competition, they may add additional fees (e.g. tuition) to universities across the board. They may find canteens unsustainable with a profit motive.

Functionally, the consumer has the same problem: competition isn't giving them alternative choices and variety, policy and options are mandated to them. Providers may find school canteens too expensive so they close them, the one who thinks an opportunity may open one but be forced to charge a fee too high for participants to consider so ultimately lunches get packed anyways. In theory the market dictates these things from consumer consensus but consumer consensus is really just some degree of a manipulated majority opinion over w minitory. In practice I don't care who dictates it, my voice (dollar in this case) doesn't seem to matter all that much in contexts without healthy competition.

There's definitely some sort of threshold level of actual competition (however we define that) that has to exist to create a landscape of options for the consumer. As time progresses, the argument for private enterprise grows weaker, in my opinion. The solution is for markets to become less anti-competitive, to allow real competition (not sure how we achieve this). An issue is, no one wants to do this and is incentivized to be anti-competitive in every way they can.

>Why do you trust the company will continue to provide said benefits?

Not sure if this is a great example from history. But my 87 year old grandmother still receives a monthly pension check from IBM from my late grandfather who passed away 6 years ago and retired over 30 years ago.

I'm sure IBM wouldn't be making these payments if they had any other option. I think the answer to your question is "because they are obligated to" via contracts signed with employees (and ex-employees, and even deceased employees).

One could counter that example with the multitudes of businesses who failed on meeting their defined benefit pension promises, resulting in laws like ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006, which resulted in businesses ceasing to offer defined benefit pensions because turns out, predicting decades of future economic conditions and insuring volatility for that length of time is insanely costly.

Not to mention that IBM has been dying for a decade+. I certainly would not expect them to make good on any decent size DB pension in a few decades, and unless you are part of a politically connected group, you may or may not get fully bailed out by the feds (see General Motors pension renegotiations in 2008).

See also multi employer pension plans which have crazy regulations where if one employer fails, the other employers gets to pick up the tab.

https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/the-american-res...

Surely there's no histoic examples of this happening. Especially not in America. /s

Even better: "your salary now comes in Metabux and those can only be used to purchase things at the Metashop."

Once the company provides everything, they are in an excellent position to alter the deal, and they will.

And you will pray that they don't alter it further.

Sure. Same thing with government managed pensions. Same thing with market managed pensions. There is no certainty in life.

"Everything has risks, so reducing risks is meaningless" doesn't sound like particularly sound stance to take, especially on an issue like housing.

I don't think it is a given that not relying on corporate pensions is reducing risk. I'm curious what percentage of people have been burned by unpaid/underpaid corporate pensions vs thinking they could rely on social security/government programs for retirement.

Everything has risks, so reducing risks is meaningless; increase the rewards you are extracting for taking those risks.

Don't forget the company-provided housing.

That's what "company town" is, which is not at all what the article is talking about.

I grew up in a mining town in northern Canada where the company provided everything you mention, plus summer jobs at the mine, chartered plane to pick up students, train tickets for vehicles, and much more.

The mine was originally owned by a group that started in the area so they had incentives to make the area great for the employees. Which they did, my grandfather and father got great paying jobs that allowed them to support their families.

But then a massive mining company came in and bought majority shares in the mine and they have been scraping these benefits ever since.

My point is, you never know what's going to happen. So don't get to attached to these benefits. For most places that's alright because there are other opportunities, but in a mining town there generally is one employer.

This ^ but it's an employee owned company. And since the company is doing so many things, like running schools and towns and pensions and scholarships, we should have some of the employees represent all of the others to make sure all the voices are heard. We could vote on those representatives and even have two different sets to keep them in check.

Either a portion of each employees pay could fund all of this or since the company is providing everything then we could just do without pay entirely. Not sure which method is best really.

I'm sorry, but without introducing blockchains you have just suggested a democratic republic and surely that can't work?