TRUCK SYSTEM. This system has much influence on the relation between employers end workmen, in the manufacturing districts. The term truck, which means exchange or barter, is now used to signify the payment of wages of labour in goods, and not in money. By the truck-system is meant this mode of paying wages, together with all its tendencies and results. The Truck Act is an act passed in 1831, which, repealing all the previous acts passed for the same purpose, made stricter provisions for the prevention of payment of wages in truck in the departments of industry therein enumerated. The wages of agricul tural labourers and domestic servants are ex empted from the operation of the act. The evidence published in the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on this sullied, in 1812, shows that, notwithstanding the Truck eket, the truck-system is still in extensive operation in mills, factories, iron works, collieries, and stone-quarries in the kingdom, and abundantly illustrates the evil tendencies of the system.
The chief part of the evil of what is called the truck-system is incidental, and not essen tial to the payment of wages in truck, and arises out of the power of the master over the workman, which enables the master to use this mode of paying wages to defraud and oppress the workmen, A master may pay the wages of hie workmen wholly or in part in truck, in articles of food, clothing, &o., either
by agreement or with only the understood con sent of his workmen ; and if he supply these articles at prices PO higher than those at which they are to be procured elsewhere, and study to meet the various wants of the workmen and their families, the utmost harm that can result is the loss to the workmen of the moral and economical lessons which the disbursement by themselves of weekly money-wages is fitted to supply, and the interference with the business and profits of neighbouring retail shopkeepers ; and there will always in such castes be some advantage to set against these, so far as they go, evil results. Where the truck-system acts beneficially, it is owing entirely to the justice and benevolence of the individual truck masters, On the character of the master everything depends. In the hands of masters of opposite character, and under dream .
stances, whether of scarcity Of employment, of isolated situation, or ofcombination among masters in the same business, or through an extensive district, which place the workman Snore or less at the mercy of his employer, the payntent of wages ha truck may be, and continually has been, and is still extensively, need for the defrauding and oppressing of workmen: •