IELTS Reading: Multiple Choice

Workplace campuses

The idea of integrating work and living spaces is not new. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many industrial firms established company towns – self-contained communities where the employer owned the housing, stores and entertainment venues, and employed nearly everyone in a local factory or mine. These towns often emerged in remote locations, where employers needed to provide workers not only with jobs, but also with basic necessities. Some owners and builders of company towns, such as George Pullman and Henry Ford, envisioned idealised communities, but company towns were also criticised for being paternalistic and exploitative. Economically, they created what is known as a monopsony, a labour market dominated by a single employer. Without competition for workers, companies could suppress wages.

As automobiles became more affordable, company towns began to fade. Workers gained the freedom to live further from their jobs, diminishing the need for employer-provided housing. This led to the rise of the suburban corporate headquarters, such as those built by Bell Labs in the 1960s. These early workplace campuses were primarily utilitarian – clusters of office buildings and laboratories with a functional cafeteria – but they lacked the lifestyle amenities and integration we associate with today’s tech campuses.

Modern workplace campuses, pioneered by companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook, reflect a shift towards more holistic, university-inspired environments. These settings blend work, leisure and increasingly, housing. Facebook’s Willow Village, for instance, is a planned development near Menlo Park, California, which will include approximately 1,500 residential units. Employees who live there may even qualify for company incentives. While these new developments echo the structure of historical company towns, they come with a distinctly modern emphasis on convenience, community and employee retention.

Yet they are not without controversy. Critics of Willow Village have dubbed it “Zucktown” after the company’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, raising concerns about the erosion of boundaries between employees’ professional and personal lives. Some worry that living so close to work may lead to burnout or a diminished sense of separation between employees’ identities and their jobs. Like work-from-home arrangements, these corporate villages aim to reduce commute times and improve quality of life, but they may also concentrate corporate influence in ways that echo the economic control of the old company towns.

The all-encompassing nature of modern workplace campuses also means a manager’s job description greatly expands to include small-city management functions. As these campuses grow in size and complexity, they may require heightened security measures that increasingly resemble the responsibilities of city police. Growth of the compound will challenge managers to comply with city planning and zoning regulations. These corporate villages within cities place additional demands on municipal services, requiring careful consideration of how they contribute to local infrastructure and public needs. Cities may increasingly expect – or even require – larger tax contributions from mega-corporate campus developers to offset the burdens these developments place on public resources.

One of the most prominent and ambitious examples of this new model of workplace campus is Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. In 2011, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, appeared before the Cupertino City Council to present his plans for the new campus on the outskirts of the city. The project, known as the “Ring” because of its circular shape, has now been constructed. The total size of the building is over 260,000 square metres and it accommodates over 12,000 employees. Jobs planned the innovative facility to inspire engineers and programmers charged with creating new Apple devices and tools. Its shape is meant to allow them to collaborate while maintaining a connection to nature. Jobs also hoped the building would enable Apple to better safeguard its secrets, because it is large enough to house so many employees and data systems in one secure location. The building is sustainable due to solar panels that provide all its energy needs, and the campus includes nine thousand drought-resistant trees planted to withstand a changing climate.

Critics, however, say the Ring’s outer-city location and inward-looking shape, giving many in it a view of only the other side of the building, discourages staff members from having meaningful engagement with the rest of the city. Apple arguably missed the opportunity to have a more positive impact on Cupertino’s economy because it opted to construct a new facility on the outskirts rather than remodel an existing building in the heart of the city. Had they done this, critics argue, it might have brought greater foot traffic to support local businesses. However, it must be said that ninety per cent of Ring workers are not locals – they commute to work by private car or shuttle bus, so they might not have made an impact on the city even if Apple had made a different decision. Despite the criticisms it has attracted, Jobs’ approach to the $5 billion Apple campus is unquestionably part of a growing trend to create company campuses.

“Business Ethics” by OpenStax is licensed under CC BY 4.0. A small excerpt was extracted from Chapter 10 and edited. This textbook can be downloaded free from https://openstax.org/details/books/business-ethics.