Profit-Sharing. 



37 



employers for their proportion of the losses in a bad year. Other 

 employees could offer no security whatever in such a case ; therefore 

 the losses must come upon the employers in the end. It is this fact 

 that hurts the prospects of profit-sharing more than auy other. Such 

 an arrangement cannot be in the nature of a true partnership; be- 

 cause, as noted above, there is a partnership so far as the gains are 

 concerned, but the partnership census wh< n thnvaiv losses. Hence, 

 as at present tried, the system of profit-sharing is really a gratuity on 

 the part of the employers. This should not be so. The extreme 

 grounds taken by the Knights of Labor and, to a lesser extent, by the 

 trades-unions, have been due, for the most part, to a feeling among 

 the employed that the employers were making large profits and that 

 the men should have a share of them. Occasionally an employer has 

 been willing to concede the truth of this, enough to give his men a 

 share in the profits; but most of the employers have taken the ground 

 that they must average their good years with their poor years in order 

 to keep their men employed uniformly. 



Hence there has been little gain, except in a few instances of 

 profit-sharing, in bringing about a sympathy between the employers 

 and their men. Without such sympathy it is impossible for capital 

 and labor properly to understand each other, or to work in harmony. 

 A careful study of the instances in which profit-sharing has been a 

 success shows that those employers who have succeeded were those 

 small employers a generation ago, before the advent of the great cor- 

 porations. There could be no greater enemy to the cause of the work- 

 ingmen than the prevailing idea of to-day, to combine every thing in 

 the shape of trusts. Edward Bellamy and other writers carry more 

 truth in their predictions than will be admitted by those who have 

 made no study of the facts. Some day there may be a revulsion of 

 feeling against such combinations that may lead to the more simple 

 and direct methods of employment that were in vogue two gen- 

 erations ago when strikes were almost unknown. The present ten- 

 dency toward trusts is wholly away from any form of profit-sharing; 

 and this is one of the worst signs of the times. On the other hand, 

 and the speaker has it from prominent members of labor organiza- 

 tions, the tendency among such organizations is toward profit-sharing 

 as the only method that will be fair toward both the employer and 

 the employed. But even if trusts were out of the way, can any one 

 promise that employers shall always have good years; that in the event 

 of a poor year the employed would make up the losses; or that any 

 system of profit-sharing has yet been devised which may be called ab- 



