The truck system and the end of payment in cider

Truck is the payment of wages in goods, or in tokens redeemable only at an employer’s shop. It was widespread in nineteenth-century British industry and was attacked because it allowed employers to set the value of what they handed over, to overcharge, and to bind workers by debt. The mining and metal trades produced the most notorious examples.

Agricultural payment in kind was a different case in origin — board, lodging, food and drink for resident farm servants was an ancient arrangement rather than a company-shop swindle — but its effects overlapped. It reduced the cash wage, it made the worker dependent, and it removed his freedom to spend his earnings as he chose.

Cider sits awkwardly across the two. It was customary, it was genuinely wanted by many of the men who received it, and it was also a way of paying less money for the same labour.

The Truck Act of 1831 required that the wages of workers in the trades it covered be paid in the current coin of the realm, and voided contracts specifying how wages must be spent. Agricultural labourers were not among the covered workers, so a Somerset or Herefordshire farm was untouched by it.

A series of later measures narrowed the gap. Legislation of the 1880s prohibited the payment of wages in public houses, addressing a related abuse, and the Truck Amendment Act of 1887 extended the definition of workman so that agricultural labourers came within the truck legislation.

The 1887 extension did not simply abolish the cider allowance, and this is the point most summaries get wrong. What truck law prohibited was paying wages otherwise than in coin. A farmer who paid a lawful cash wage and additionally provided drink consumed on the premises was in a different position, and the customary allowance continued on that footing in many places.

The first reason is that enforcement in agriculture was almost non-existent. Truck prosecutions required a complainant, and a labourer in a village where one or two farmers controlled the available work had every reason not to be one.

The second is that both parties often preferred the arrangement. Where the cash wage was low, the allowance was a real component of subsistence; withdrawing it without a compensating rise made the labourer poorer, and some who campaigned against truck acknowledged as much.

The third is the definitional one above. A custom recharacterised as a gratuity or an allowance, rather than as wages, could continue lawfully. Practices that a statute has made awkward rather than impossible tend to persist in the countryside for a long time.

The machinery that actually mattered was wage regulation. From the 1920s statutory agricultural wages boards set minimum cash rates and governed what benefits in kind could be counted against them, which turned the allowance from a matter of custom into a matter of accounting. Once the drink had to be valued and offset, its usefulness to the employer fell away.

Alongside that, the labour force disappeared. Mechanisation, the movement of workers out of agriculture and the decline of the living-in farm servant removed the population the allowance had served. A farm with two tractor drivers had no reason to keep a cellar for the harvest.

By the middle of the twentieth century the allowance survived mainly as a residual custom on some farms, and then as a memory. Its disappearance is one of the reasons farm cider making itself contracted: the drink had lost the function that justified making it in bulk.