| > which payment is made Yes, that's right, labour offered in a trade is a form of payment. All trades sees both sides of the transaction make a payment. In the most common case as it pertains to employment, I pay you labour, you pay me money, at which point the trade is settled. But since the law states that money must always been accepted as a form of payment I can also pay you money in place of my labour. Per the law, the employer has to accept it. Thus, any time you don't want to go to work you simply have to offer money instead of labour, which you will get back since the employer is still obligated to fulfil their side of the trade. It's an interesting approach. But doesn't seem tenable in the real world, so it is not surprising that it is oft ignored. > and says you can’t accept credit card and not cash Exactly. Credit cards don't offer money, but instead offer tokens that you can later trade for money. Practicalities aside, no different than accepting chickens and then trading those chickens for money. Or no different than accepting labour and then trading that labour for money. It's all the same. A trade is a trade is trade. The law here requires that the cash must be accepted as a substitute in a trade. |
Colloquially, in English, one could think of "labor" as a form of "payment" in the way you describe.
In the legal context, things like "labor" and "payment" and "trade" have specific meanings. These meanings cannot be interchanged with any other "technically not grammatically incorrect" definition of the same word as it might be used in spoken English.
Misunderstandings like this are also leveraged by, for example, the Sovereign Citizen movement, with similar levels of validity.