made to take a strong enough personal interest he will use care when the eye of the foreman is not upon him.  The product also can be slightly increased in many ways by the workman’s exertions or suggestions.  In some cases the quality of the work cannot be insured by the closest inspection as well as it can be by a small degree of personal interest.  Either responsibility for the fault cannot be fixed, or the defect is one not measurable by any easily applied standard.  Strikes may be averted, good feeling promoted, and contentment furthered if the interest of the worker can be made to approach, and in large measure to become in harmony with, that of the employer.  The economic result of the plan, if it can be made to work, should be to reduce the costs of these establishments below what they are.  The crucial question is whether profit-sharing alone in any particular case will insure that the costs will be less than those of competitors, thus giving a source out of which an increased amount, really a wage, can be paid to the laborer.  For the amount of profits is affected not only by the amount of output, but also by a number of other things that are quite outside the control of the workmen.

Sec. 10. #Examples of profit-sharing.# The profit-sharing plan seems first to have been successfully tried in Paris, in 1842, by Leclaire, a house-painter.  In house-painting there is often a great waste of materials and time by men working singly or in small groups in different parts of the city.  By this new method Leclaire enlisted the aid of the workmen, reduced the costs, and increased the profits.  It is a remarkable fact that the plan has been continued successfully by the same firm to the present time.  It has been tried in many hundreds, possibly thousands, of cases, and is operating in some form or another in more than a hundred firms in Europe and America.  The most notable examples of profit-sharing in the United States are the Pillsbury Mills in Minneapolis, Procter and Gamble’s soap-factories, in Ivorydale, Ohio, the Nelson Mfg.  Co., in Leclaire, Ill., and the Ford Automobile Works, in Detroit.  In some cases both manufacturer and workmen value the system highly.  It probably has its greatest success when applied in prosperous establishments where profits are regular and large, and where a steady working force is especially desired.  The proportion of business done in this way is not large.  One hundred firms is a very small fraction of 1 per cent of the total number of firms in Germany, France, England, and America.  A still more important fact is that true profit-sharing has spread little since 1890, tho various practices have developed under that name.  The most noteworthy of these is the selling of stock, usually at a somewhat lower price, to the employees of a corporation so that, as stockholders, they may have a motive to work for the success of the company (e.g., the United States Steel Corporation).  This method as applied to a select few of the employees, who are advanced to official positions in a corporation, is very widely adopted.