But the results of the Troy experiment, typical of the others, show how
far from a successful solution of the labor problem is productive
cooperation. Although this "Troy Cooperative Iron Founders' Association"
was planned with great deliberation and launched at a time when the
regular stove manufacturers were embarrassed by strikes, and although it
was regularly incorporated with a provision that each member was
entitled to but one vote whether he held one share at $100, or the
maximum privilege of fifty in the total of two thousand shares, it
failed as did the others in furnishing permanent relief to the workers
as a class. At the end of the third year of this enterprise, the
_American Workman_ published a sympathetic account of its progress
unconsciously disclosing its fatal weakness, namely, the inevitable
tendency of cooperators to adopt the capitalistic view. The writer of
this account quotes from these cooperators to show that "the fewer the
stockholders in the company the greater its success."
A similar instance is furnished by the Cooperative Foundry Company of
Rochester.
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