Over at Truck and Barter there’s a little discussion of the difference between truck, barter and exchange. Go read.
Barter and exchange we all think we understand. Truck, while this may not have been the original meaning, has a specific meaning in English. Thus the Truck Acts of the late 1800’s, and their repeal in the 1980’s ( as we didn’t need them any more ).
Truck was the practice of paying workers not in legal tender, but in credit at the company store. One can extend this to subsidised housing, company health care, just as far as you wish to go.
This idea of course led to corruption and great poverty, as while the workers might be getting the going wage, the prices in the company store could be ( and guess what actually happened ? ) higher than general prices. Or quality worse. And of course there was only one company store, so no competition to keep it on its toes, and as there was no legal tender involved, no possibility of a competitor arriving.
Think what it would have been like in a, say, 1860’s mining village, the only employer the pit, the only money that issued by the pit, the only pub or shop owned by the pit, and if you start complaining about this, guess where your job goes ?
Thus the Truck Acts, insisting that everyone must be paid in cash, legal tender. Not in company money, not in credit.
Why the repeal ? By the 1980’s the multiplicity of both employers and retailers made them unnecessary, allied of course with the astonishing growth in mobility over a century before.
Looking at the modern world, the closest that we see to truck economies might be the organisation of the large Soviet or Maoist industries, where your factory organises (d) your health care, housing, holidays, children’s education and the provisions in the local food store. And yes I have been to some of these places, and yes they suck just as much as the old pit villages did.
Fortunately such systems would have been illegal in the UK, until we got to the point where they would not be possible anyway.