Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/437

Rh no security whatever in such a case; therefore, the losses must come upon the employers in the end. It is this fact, more than any other, that hurts the prospects of profit-sharing. Such an arrangement can not be in the nature of a true partnership, because, as noted above, there is a partnership so far as the gains are concerned, but the partnership ceases when there are losses. Hence, as at present tried, the system of profit-sharing is really a gratuity on the part of the employers, most of them having taken the ground that they must average their good years with their poor years in order to keep their men employed uniformly.

The machinery of profit-sharing is not complete without some provision for a contingent fund to tide the employer over his bad years; and even then it is a question whether the profits should not be disposed of on a basis of piecework instead of time. In a bad year the capitalist should accept a smaller percentage on his investment; and the workman, a smaller compensation for his labor. It may be hard for the employer to send his children to cheaper schools, but it is no harder than it is for the employee to go without butter and other necessaries of life.

Even with the instances of profit-sharing that have been tried there has been little gain in bringing about a true 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 the employers who have succeeded were the small employers of a generation ago, before the advent of the great corporations. There could be no greater enemy to the cause of the workingmen than the prevailing idea of to-day to combine everything 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 in practice two generations ago, when strikes were almost unknown. The present tendency toward trusts is wholly away from any form of profit-sharing, and this is one of the worst signs of the times.

We are led irresistibly to the conclusion that neither profit-sharing nor any other device will improve the present situation, so long as there is a lack of sympathy in either side toward the other. The employers and the holders of great wealth should regard themselves not as mere irresponsible giants of finance, but as sacredly responsible to society for the large interests that have been intrusted to them. The too frequent want of such a broad idea of his functions has led the public to believe that the capitalist is a man who absorbs all the toil of the laboring man,