Truck system

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The truck system is an arrangement whereby a predatory employer coerces employees into accepting over-priced commodities in lieu of wages for work performed. While this system had long existed in many parts of the world, it became widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as one of the characteristics of increasing industrialisation was an increase in the number of unskilled, poverty-stricken workers whose only alternative to acceptance of the system was starvation and extreme hardship.

Clarification of the term

The practice was ostensibly one of a free and legal exchange, whereby an employer would offer something of value (typically goods, food, or housing) in exchange for labour, with the result being the same as if the labourer had been paid money and then spent the money on these necessities. The word truck came into the English language within this context, from the French troquer, meaning 'exchange' or 'barter'.

However, such a system becomes insidious by coercing labourers into accepting over-priced or worthless commodities instead of wages, or (equivalently) requiring that wages be spent at an employer-controlled store that over-prices commodities. The term truck system applies exclusively to this system, and not to an honest system of free and willing exchange, such as a barter or payment in kind system.

Variations of the truck system existed world-wide, and were known by various names. That they were all the same system is shown by the fact that when such systems were banned, the same specific activities were outlawed: it was made illegal for payment to be made other than in lawful money, and it was made illegal to specify how or where employees spent their pay.

See also

• barter
• payment in kind
• debt bondage
• sharecropping
• statare
• company town
• Truck Acts

References

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Last updated on Tuesday July 08, 2008 at 20:26:51 PDT (GMT -0700)
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