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Workers will be paid when they please in a tight market | Financial Times

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"In 1954, UK-based technology company Pye Radio came up with a neat little cost-cutting innovation. In order to avoid the expense that came with collecting cash from the bank, guarding it, checking it and sorting it into individual wage packets, they decided they would pay their (mostly very skilled) workers by cheque.

It did not go well. Employees weren’t keen on having to do the extra work of collecting the cash themselves. Protests were made on the basis that the system contravened the Truck Act of 1831, which forced employers to pay wages in the ‘current coin of the realm’ (rather than in scrip). The labour market was tight at the time; unemployment in the UK was under 2 per cent. Pye went back to cash.

It was another six years until they could try again: the 1960 Payment of Wages Act finally allowed employers to pay wages by cheque, something the banks had long been pushing for (people with cheques often like to have bank accounts)."

From "Workers will be paid when they please in a tight market | Financial Times".

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