Truck System

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-owned store, where prices are set artificially high. The practice has been widely criticized as exploitative and similar in effect to slavery, and has been outlawed in many parts of the world.

The practice is ostensibly one of a free and legal exchange, whereby an employer offers 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 those necessities. The word truck came into the English language within this context, from the French troquer, meaning to "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.

While this system had long existed in many parts of the world, it became widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries. In a prosecution brought against a Manchester cotton manufacturer in 1827 one worker gave evidence that he had received wages of only two shillings in nine months; the rest "he was obliged to take from the manufacturer's daughter, who was also the cashier".

In the UK the Truck system was sometimes referred to as the Tommy system. The 1901 edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable notes the Tommy shop as:

Where wages are paid to workmen who are expected to lay out a part of the money for the good of the shop. Tommy means bread or a penny roll, or the food taken by a workman in his handkerchief ; it also means goods in lieu of money. A Tom and Jerry shop is a low-drinking room.

In the Midland Tour of his Rural Rides, the agriculturist and political reformer William Cobbett reports the use of the truck or tommy system in Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury. He describes the logic of the Tommy as:

The manner of carrying on the tommy system is this: suppose there to be a master who employs a hundred men. That hundred men, let us suppose, to earn a pound a week each. This is not the case in the iron-works; but no matter, we can illustrate our meaning by one sum as well as by another. These men lay out weekly the whole of the hundred pounds in victuals, drink, clothing, bedding, fuel, and house-rent. Now, the master finding the profits of his trade fall off very much, and being at the same time in want of money to pay the hundred pounds weekly, and perceiving that these hundred pounds are carried away at once, and given to shopkeepers of various descriptions; to butchers, bakers, drapers, hatters, shoemakers, and the rest; and knowing that, on an average, these shopkeepers must all have a profit of thirty per cent., or more, he determines to keep this thirty per cent. to himself; and this is thirty pounds a week gained as a shop-keeper, which amounts to 1,560l. a year. He, therefore, sets up a tommy shop: a long place containing every commodity that the workman can want, liquor and house-room excepted.

Although Cobbet sees nothing wrong in itself in the tommy system; he notes that The only question is in this case of the manufacturing tommy work, whether the master charges a higher price than the shop-keepers would charge; but given the guaranteed market Cobbett sees no reason why any master should ever abuse the system. However, in rural regions he notes the virtual monopoly of the shop keeper:

I have often had to observe on the cruel effects of the suppression of markets and fairs, and on the consequent power of extortion possessed by the country shop-keepers. And what a thing it is to reflect on, that these shopkeepers have the whole of the labouring men of England constantly in their debt; have on an average a mortgage on their wages to the amount of five or six weeks, and make them pay any price that they choose to extort.

A reason for the truck system in the early history of the United States is because there was no national currency and an insufficient supply of coinage. Banknotes were the majority of the money in circulation. Banknotes were discounted relative to gold and silver (e.g. a $5 banknote may exchange for $4.50 of coins) and the discount depended on the financial strength of the issuing bank and distance from the bank. During financial crises many banks failed and their notes became worthless.

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".