ABSTRACT
Profit-sharing firms as well as non-profit-sharing concerns evenly failed to prosper. It is evident that profit-sharing was not a particularly effective remedy for unprofitable business, and notwithstanding the earlier belief that profit-sharing would bring about prosperity, the firms with instituted profit-sharing system followed the same financial fluctuations as others. Examining the general obstacles to the development of profit-sharing to which all economies were subjected, the chapter now turns to peculiar circumstances of the British economy. H. Gospel sums up the current assessment of profit-sharing as follows: Co-partnership and profit-sharing were on the whole aimed more at preserving managerial prerogatives through incorporative provisions directed especially at binding skilled labor to the firm, containing industrial conflict, and undermining the power and influence of established trade unions. The connotation of welfare capitalism is buying worker loyalty at cheap cost and thus retaining the existing economic and social relations as well as power structure. Profit-sharing undoubtedly contained such elements, and many schemes revealed such intentions.
