Full Citation
Title: Beyond Racism and Poverty: The Truck System on Louisiana Plantations and Dutch Peateries
Citation Type: Book, Whole
Publication Year: 2018
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Abstract: These lines are from Merle Travis' 1946 country song Sixteen Tons, which refers to debt bondage in the Kentucky coal mines. Travis was inspired by his father-a coal miner-who told him that he could not afford to die because he owed his soul to the company store.2 He was not the only one describing these practices, though he may have been the only one to do it in song. A nineteenth century Dutch turf maker, for example, described a worker who became 'more and more a slave' due to his indebtedness.3 The payment system referred to in Sixteen Tons and by the turf maker is better known as the truck system. According to historian George W. Hilton, a major contributor to research on the practice, the truck system may be defined as 'a set of closely related arrangements whereby some form of consumption is tied to the employment contract'.4 Laborers were paid wholly or partly in a non-cash manner: directly in food rations, housing, or other products, or indirectly in good from a store owned by their employer. A common method was providing goods on credit that was later deducted from the total amount earned, or the payment of wages in tickets only redeemable for goods in the employer's store. This often-unwritten form of compulsion to spend part of their wages in their employer's or affiliated store has been called 'retail coercion'.5
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Authors: Lurvink, Karin
Publisher: Brill Publishers
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Race and Ethnicity
Countries: United States