Truck wages  

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A truck system is an arrangement in which employees are paid in commodities or some currency substitute (referred to as scrip), rather than with standard money. This limits employees' ability to choose how to spend their earnings—generally to the benefit of the employer. As an example, scrip might be usable only for the purchase of goods at a "company store" where prices are set artificially high.

While this system had long existed in many parts of the world, it became widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as industrialisation left many poor, unskilled workers without other means to support themselves and their families. The practice has been widely criticised as exploitative and similar in effect to slavery, and has been outlawed in many parts of the world. Variations of the truck system have existed worldwide, and are known by various names.

The practice is ostensibly one of a free and legal exchange, whereby an employer would offer something of value (typically goods, food or housing) in exchange for labor, with the result being the same as if the laborer 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'. A truck system differs from this kind of open barter or payment in kind system by creating or taking advantage of a closed economic system in which workers have little or no opportunity to choose other work arrangements, and can easily become so indebted to their employers that they are unable to leave the system legally. The popular song "Sixteen Tons" dramatizes this scenario, with the narrator telling Saint Peter (who would welcome him to Heaven upon his death) "...I can't go; I owe my soul to the company store."

Truck systems came under increasing criticism, and laws were passed in many jurisdictions that made it illegal for payment to be made other than in lawful money, and to specify how or where employees spent their pay.

Origin of the saying "I'll have no truck with that" to mean "I will have nothing to do with that system".

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Truck wages" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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