Truck System. Will we see it again? My smart money says...YES we WILL!

In our rapid descent into the 1800's...there is no doubt that we will return to this. Yep Yep Yep.:(


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system
>>>snip
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".

he was a sharecropper, the owner had a company store. They didn't get any cash at all but a cheap-ass wooden shack, and a chance to buy from the company store and then "settle up" each harvest. Wow, what a bargain! /s

My grandfather died on that fucking asshole's field of a heart attack, with his 6 yr. old daughter beside him (my mother).

those who protest or opt out will have to go to another company town to get work.

I grew up in the southern WV coalfields. I know all about company stores, company housing, and company police. Tennessee Ernie Ford was right.