to be a deficit. The employés of all departments voluntarily agreed to a cut of 25 per cent, on wages, they to be recouped when business permitted. This was done at the end of the year, the condition of the business allowing even a small interest on capital. The following year the men agreed, again voluntarily, to work ten hours a day instead of nine. "The company believes that the hourly return for nine hours is greater than the hourly return for ten, but in the aggregate more work will be done in ten hours than in nine." These two years were a severe test, but resulted in a proof of the feasibility, of the plan.
Mr. Nelson is a believer in cooperation as a status to be reached through profit sharing.[1] In this his hopes have not been realized. Though of the five hundred of his employés, all who have been with him for ten months, who participate in the division of the bonus, about four hundred are also holders of stock. A recent attempt at an innovation resulted in so much misunderstanding in the newspaper accounts that the company's statement is essential to a correct estimate of the experiment:
The proposal which made a momentary disturbance in one of the LeClaire departments—only one—December 1 (1895), was that the department which was the oldest at LeClaire should become the owners of the plant and working capital at its first cost, by contributing at the start one-fourth of their wages when working full time, the proportion to decrease at double the rate at which they should decrease the purchase price; that they should pay the company 6 per cent, interest on the investment, and have all the profits; that they should organize as a cooperative concern as soon as one-tenth of the purchase price was paid off; that the company should have control, but without any charge for business management, until they had paid off one-half. The company estimate that at the end of the first year there would be a reduction from wages of about one-eight, and at the end of the second year nothing; and that the whole would be paid in about six or eight years. The objections, which seem not to have been raised in the meeting, were the immediate loss of wages and the fear of a going-alone idea. A good part of the force went right along and never
- ↑ Through Profit Sharing to Cooperation in The Employer and Employed for January 1894.
