Another possibility is that HEB thinks it’s strategic to make workers feel like they have a stake in the company. By paying workers based on the performance of the entire enterprise, they might work harder because they feel they’re contributing to something they’ll share the spoils of. This is not far off from John Stuart Mill’s concept of industrial cooperatives, or Robert Owen’s experimental utopian communities during the Industrial Revolution, first in Scotland and then in a town called New Harmony, Indiana.

Maybe HEB instituted its new profit-sharing program in order to get good publicity. There are several ways to treat workers well: HEB could’ve boosted wages, or increased their 401(k) matching, or implemented more family-friendly work policies. Costco, for example, has a more generous 401(k) arrangement and has a company-wide minimum wage that’s higher than HEB’s. But as beneficial as these changes would have been for HEB’s workers, they wouldn’t attract nearly as much media attention as a profit-sharing program. HEB’s announcement certainly wasn’t a devious ploy for attention, but it does have the perk of bringing in more publicity than, say, an improvement in pensions.

Whatever HEB’s reasoning was, more and more companies might start sharing profits with workers in a similar way. Today, proponents of profit-sharing include Hillary Clinton, Harvard’s Richard Freeman, and Rutgers’s Joseph Blasi and Douglas Kruse. They’d like to see companies with profit-sharing programs get tax breaks and preferential treatment when government contracts are awarded. Clinton’s proposal would give a lot more money to workers than even HEB’s.

Profit-sharing programs, though, can sometimes be risky because they can violate the principle of portfolio diversification: It’s not a good idea for a worker’s income and assets to be coming from the same place. (HEB’s plan avoids this, because the chain has a 401(k) plan, which allows workers to invest in companies other than their own employer.)

There’s another reason that could explain how HEB arrived at its decision: Maybe it realized that this is the direction the economy is going. The unemployment rate is marching ever lower, and pressure from labor activists to treat workers better is only growing. What will happen when unemployment falls below 5 percent? Will more employers improve compensation and worker training? Will they start investing in the rank and file?

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.