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Table 9

Availability and Use of Investment Options in 401(k) Plans

Investment Option

Availability (%)

Use, Given Availability (%)

Equity Funds

· Long-term growth

60

61

· Growth and income

52

64

· Aggressive growth

45

60

· Company stock

42

59

· Index fund

34

41

· International

27

50

· Balanced funds

24

58

Bond Funds

· Guaranteed investment contract

42

55

· Money market fund

36

36

· U.S. government bond

24

30

· Long-term bond

19

33

· High-yield bond

14

26

· Short-term bond

10

22

· Corporate bond

9

34

Asset-allocation funds

· High risk

15

45

· Moderate risk

19

43

· Low risk

14

39

Source: Access Research 1995.

The chief impediment to the expansion of

material interests of labor and management

worker capitalism was the philosophy that

would be reconciled; that labor unrest and

the worker's status as a capitalist should be

political class struggle would decline; and

Fifty-one percent

kept hostage to the specific fortunes of his

that labor productivity and compensation

of respondents

company. Thus, many early profit sharing

would rise in consequence.

checked their

experiments perished in the stock crash of

They persuaded Congress to allow them

1892. Later, the market meltdown of 1929

to write off shared profits as a wage expense,

investments once

liquidated roughly 70 percent of such

avoiding double taxation on compensation.

a week or more,

plans.4 6

The DC plans of today are the lineal descen-

75 percent at least

dants of their efforts. Such programs are now

Still, businessmen who had run profit

sufficiently widespread that we can gauge the

sharing workplaces remained enthusiastic

once a month.

accuracy of the industrialists' predictions.

about their potential. A group of industrial-

Eighteen percent

The available evidence tends to confirm

ists testified to that effect before the Senate

them.

Finance Committee in 1939. They main-

checked "every

tained that laborers, as stock owners and

day."

Event Horizons

profit sharers, would develop event horizons

The great mass of American stockholders

longer than a paycheck period. They further

invest as a long-term strategy, as the early pio-

believed that through profit sharing the

16