REVIEWS 689
Lloyd takes issue with the defenders of the Rochdale system who have followed Mrs. Webb in denouncing a bonus to labor as unnecessary and undemocratic. He quotes the statement by one of the Rochdale adherents, which explains their attitude :
The manager of the Wheat Sheaf was outspoken in his condemnation of the labor copartnership idea. It was the "creation," he said, "of an aristoc- racy of labor." In his opinion, the duty of cooperative manufacturers is to get the goods to the consumer at the cheapest possible price, and they have no right to make this price dearer by paying more than the market rate of wages.
The case is stated much more strongly by Mrs. Webb when she urges that the danger of labor copartnership lies in the undermining of the trade-union standard by a vertical instead of a horizontal cleavage in industry. Mr. Lloyd contends that the labor copartnership organi- zations have always encouraged trade-unionism, and have merely added to its benefits. He, however, includes in his book a description of the profit-sharing system of the South Metropolitan Gas Company of Lon- don, which was really introduced in order to break up trade-unionism, and has not only been successful in that, but
Mr. Livesey has himself made it an argument against municipal ownership of gas works that municipalities having no stock could not admit their employes, as his company has done, to participation in profits and manage- ment ; and he has repeatedly avowed that he believes that the Employ^ Share- holder and Workman Director is an institution which will make socialism impossible, because it will give the wage-earner the possession of property.
This is certainly a menace to the large democratic movement of the Rochdale system, but it seems to be obviated in the actual practice of the copartnership system. The new element introduced into the labor copartnership societies is the admission of other bodies than coopera- tive stores as shareholders. The Christian Socialists and all the older schools of cooperation advocate paying a bonus to workingmen, and this has been the practice of the Scottish Wholesale Society, but the labor copartnership organizations have not only done this, but they often require all workingmen to be shareholders and permit them to be directors, and they admit outside individuals as shareholders. The dividends are then distributed among all the shareholders, whether societies, or individual workers, or outsiders, and in addition to this they pay several kinds of bonus.
A member of a managing committee in a cooperative concern like this
