ABSTRACT
Profit-sharing was devised not by visionary theorists but by a practical employer, the Frenchman Edme-Jean Leclaire. Leclaire, the father of profit-sharing, was born in 1801, the son of a poor village shoemaker. His extraordinary ability, energy, and determination brought success; his firm, Maison Leclaire in Paris, had two hundred workers at the inauguration of his profit-sharing plan in 1842. Henry Briggs's scheme was started in 1865 in more turbulent circumstances than its French counterpart: whereas Leclaire had no real labor trouble at the time of the scheme's inception; the Briggs collieries had suffered from serious labor disputes for years. The proponents of the profit-sharing movement were far from a homogeneous group. Social reformers, such as Christian Socialists, envisaged profit-sharing and co-partnership as a form of industrial reorganization; economists, including William Jevons and Alfred Marshall considered the system ethically right and economically sound.
