86 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
early twentieth centuries did much to mitigate the harshness of the common
law in relation to compensation for work-related injuries. This also made
some contribution towards ethical treatment in employment—for example
by helping ensure that financial pressures did not force injured employees to
return to work sooner than was in their best interests, and that such employees
were able to maintain a reasonable standard of living (bearing in mind that
the various workers’ compensation systems predated modern social security
legislation) (Johnstone 2004a: 55–63, and the sources cited therein). It is,
however a telling indictment of judicial attitudes to employment relationships
that over the course of 100 years the courts were unwilling or unable to undo
what they had done in decidingPriestlyv.Fowlerin 1837, and that in the end
it was left to the legislature to redress the imbalance between employer and
employee in this area.
TRUCK LEGISLATION
The term truck ‘connotes a large number of types of exploitation, including
such different things as payment in kind, the “tommy shop”, and the arbitrary
imposition of fines’ (Kahn-Freund 1949: 2). According to theShorter Oxford
Dictionarya tommy shop is ‘a store (especially one run by an employer) at
which vouchers given to employees instead of money wages may be exchanged
for goods’. These practices often had the effect that workers were deprived of
the true value of their work—whether through the provision of substandard
goods, the charging of exorbitant ‘prices’ to a captive market, or simply hold-
ing back wages due on account of defective workmanship or some (real or
imagined) infraction of the employer’s disciplinary rules.
The first comprehensive attempt to regulate these practices was the Truck
Act 1831 (Webb and Webb 1920: 50). In broad terms, this measure, together
with later amendments made by the Truck Amendment Act 1887 and the
Truck Act 1896, required that wages be paid in the coin of the realm and
forbade the making of unauthorized deductions from wages. These measures
were repealed and partially replaced by the Wages Act 1986. The relevant
provision is now to be found in Part II of the Employment Rights Act 1996.
New South Wales (1900), Queensland (1918), and Western Australia (1899)
all introduced their own versions of the imperial truck legislation in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and all three repealed them in the
1990s. The other colonies/States did not adopt truck legislation as such. How-
ever, they all made, and with the exception of Victoria, retain, legislative pro-
vision which regulates unauthorized deductions from wages. The Workplace
Relations Act 1996 (Cth) also limits the capacity of employers to withhold
wages due, at least to the extent that they cannot be reduced below the level
enshrined in the Australian Fair Pay and Conditions Standard or any relevant