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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 81
Profit-Sharing Impracticable
Profit-Sharing Impracticable.
| (a) | The workers have no voice or control in the management; |
| (b) | In which a worker may work much harder and produce more, and yet, owing to the management in which he has no share, the business makes a loss and all the worker's extra efforts go unrewarded; |
| (c) | In which the industrial worker, however much or little he works, shares the profits but does not share the losses; |
| (d) | In which the idler workers share profits along with the most industrious and skilful; |
| (e) | In which there is no natural basis of division; |
| (f) | In which, if the whole increase of the profits is due to the increase and excellence of the workers' efforts, the employer still takes his share, and vice versa, where it is the employer's business ability alone which makes the profit, the workers take their share— |
A system under which these defects arise is doomed to failure.
These are but a few of the objections even where the profit-sharing system is based upon voluntary arrangement, but ask yourselves how enormously increased the difficulties and objections would be if a profit-sharing system was forced on employers by an Arbitration Court—forced on 200 or 300 employers all making different rates of profit in the same trade.
How could it be done?
It is impossible.
The essence of such success as it has had has been cordial co-operation between employers and employees, and yet except where the circumstances were special and both sides [unclear: heartily] has been a failure. There are millions of business establishments in Great Britan am and America, but how few have tried the system? To use the words of an article on this subject in the Encyclopedia of Social Reform—"Profit-sharing has been before the world fifty years. Largely tried, it has to-day only 108 firms in all the United State and Great Britain. Society demands a (better remedy) than that which has accomplished so little in fifty years, and that of doubtful good."
And Schloss—a most sympathetic investigator—declares that "the radical defector radical feet of a method of industrial remuneration under which the rewared, servant's labour is made contingent upon the good or bad management of the business by his employer, and upon the hazards of commercial fortune, renders it difficult to admit, even with a great degree of reserve, the claim of those novel arrangements to have established a substantial improvement in the ordinary wage system."