Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/699

Rh merits and demerits of the plan both in theory and in practice. The information has been derived from extensive correspondence with every firm mentioned and many others. These firms include all that could be located through the assistance of the Association for the Promotion of Profit Sharing, their magazine The Employer and Employed, and from miscellaneous investigation. The officers of the association, Col. Carroll D. Wright, N. O. Nelson and Rev. N. P. Oilman, assure the writer that all such firms, of which they have any knowledge, are included. For the earlier experience of many of the oldest firms, the writer is indebted to Mr. Oilman's Profit Sharing between Employer and Employé, by far the most comprehensive work that has appeared in any language.

The justification often given for a purely theoretical advocacy of the plan, without any adequate presentation of evidence, is that such an exposure of evidence will result in an injury both to the experimenting firms and to the plan in general. The objection does not seem a valid one. For, in the first place, if the plan is not a success and cannot succeed, it is detrimental to the development of the very spirit desired to be promoted, by making the most progressive employers, and workmen as well, skeptical of the value of all such efforts. Again, those firms which still continue the plan, are so well known that further publicity is of no import; and judging from the general tenor of the replies from those firms that have abandoned the plan, their experiments cannot be more effectively killed. An additional justification, if any such is needed, is found in the fact that all of the several firms interrogated replied that they had experienced no injury whatever from the publicity given their business affairs.

The Pillsbury-Washburn Milling Company, of Minneapolis, Minn., inaugurated what is now the oldest profit sharing plan in operation, in September, 1882, at the end of their milling year. One