Profit-Sharing and the Labor Question. T. W. Bushill

Abstract

PROFIT-SHARINGis making a steady advance. At the beginning of the present year there were seventy-one firms in Great Britain with Ig,ooo employees practicing profit-sharing as defined by the Paris International Congress on Profit Sharing I 889, viz.: "A voluntary agreemient under which the employee receives a share fixed beforehand in the profit of a business." The number of profit-sharing firms in France was 115, Switzerland iO, Germany i8, other European countries, so far as reported, 8, and about 8o, according to Mr. Gilman, in the United States, or approxinately 300 in all.At the head of one of these English firms is Mr. Bushill of Coventry, England, who, in the first part of the valuable little book before us, presents a full account of his experiment, now five years old, substantially as given before the recent labor commission.The business is printing, bookbinding, box and pasteboard making, etc. After paying the full market rate of wages and five per cent. interest on the actual invested capital, and reserving a certain fixed but unpublished sum, called the " reserved limit," for salaries of management and reward or payment for risk, the balance of profit is equally divided between the employers and the I85 employees, but only one-third the bonus to the men is paid in cash, which is through an individual account in a savings bank. The rest of the bonus, with interest at four per cent., goes to the employee whether still at work for the firm or not, when he has attained the age of sixty-five, or completed twenty-five years of continuous service. This bonus is a first lien on the real estate and machinery of the plant.Although the employees are greatly pleased, and, without increase of any such nervous strain as would be revealed in increased payments out of the sick benefit fund, have given more zeal and faithfulness and have saved more inaterial and supplies, yet there has been a slight financial loss to the employer. This, he declares, he can at any time he chooses remedy, by a slight rise of the " reserved limit." Mr. T. WV. Bushill and his brother, however, who own the business, do not seem to nmind the slight financial loss in view of the great moral results. Says Mr. Bushill : " the pleasure which one feels on the day of the bonus announcement, at the thought of the hundred homes which are brightened with the news of the declaration of some additional remun-

Incentivization: From the current proliferation to the (re)problematization of incentives

“…It was also effective in motivational terms because it ensured that workers always acted 'under the stimulus of immediate gain' (Aldrich, 1887, p. 236). In the late nineteenth century, profit-sharing advanced steadily in Great Britain, France and the United States (Bemis, 1893;Kinley, 1891). As an officer of the Association for the Promotion of Profit Sharing, Nils Nelson (1887, p. 392) praised it for the way it valued the 'self-assertion of energetic spirits, whose exceptional ability, or industry, or energy enable them to earn more, and by their tact to get more, of the product than their fellows'.…”