Amid all the drama and hyberbole, it slipped by almost without being noticed.

Early in the first presidential debate last Monday, Hillary Clinton said: “I also want to see more companies do profit-sharing. If you help create the profits, you should be able to share in them, not just the executives at the top.”

This might have ended up as a throwaway line, but it’s a key part of Clinton’s emphasis on trying to create an economy that works for everyone. It also could end up as a key part of her appeal to voters, especially in light of the news flow of late.

Exhibit one: Wells Fargo, which doesn’t seem to think too highly of sharing the profits. Instead, as a torrent of recent news has shown, the bank has tended to demand that rank-and-file employees meet impossible sales targets or risk losing their jobs.

As long as that worked, those top-tier managers walked away with lavish compensation packages; CEO John Stumpf made $19.5m last year. True, the bank now (finally) will claw much of that back, but none of the ordinary bankers, who took on most of the risk, shared any of the rewards.

Exhibit two: Hamilton, the musical. When it shifted from New York’s Public Theater to Broadway, 22 of its stars penned a letter to its lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, aka the CEO of “Hamilton Inc”. They wanted – and got – a share of the profits the show will earn: 1% of net profits plus a slightly smaller proportion of those from every future production, including the one that just opened in Chicago.

Those actors invested their creative energy and took risks every night to make the show the slam dunk success it has been and Sellers recognized that with a share of the rewards.

There are two reasons why profit-sharing plans (and variations on this theme) are creeping back into the public discussion.

First, there’s the big picture. Since the economy began to recover from the financial crisis and the recession, the lion’s share of the gains have gone not to those who simply collected wages and salaries – which largely have seen very little change – but to those who owned financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. If you had a big investment portfolio in 2009, and simply hung on to it, you probably have done very, very well in the last seven years or so: the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has risen 105%, while the Nasdaq Composite Index has soared 150%.

No prizes for guessing which part of the population is most likely to own investment portfolios.

Secondly, as the wealth gap has grown, the gap between average CEO compensation and average worker salary has widened. Behavioral economists say that, unsurprisingly, this takes a toll on employee morale and can even dent productivity. Not surprisingly, headlines about CEOs receiving lavish paychecks and other perks when their employees struggle to eke out a living don’t make for great corporate PR.

Profit-sharing plans – which mark their centenary this year – can help address both of these problems. In many key respects, today’s plans don’t differ too much from the first deferred profit-sharing plan, established by the Harris Trust in 1916. Generally, they are structured like a defined contribution retirement plan but with the only contributions being made by the company. The business can set up a cash plan or a deferred plan, with payments being made immediately to the employee, or coming when they retire, leave the company, die or are disabled. Those payments can consist of cash or stock.

Clinton’s idea is to give those companies that adopt such a plan a two-year tax credit that is equivalent to 15% of the profit-sharing distributions. Meanwhile, an employee could receive only a sum equal to 10% of his annual salary or wages in profit-sharing, and as his income rose, it would diminish and eventually disappear.

Some existing profit-sharing plans that companies put in place end up rewarding senior executives even more lavishly than rank-and-file employees. Clinton’s goal is to direct the benefits to the lower-income and middle-income workers, or at least to restrict the tax incentives to companies that follow this track.

Several companies have announced big profit-sharing payouts this year, demonstrating that this can offer a big boost to employees bottom lines. Delta Air Lines, after reporting a record $4.5bn in profits last year, paid its now retired CEO, Richard Anderson, $15.8m in compensation for 2015. While employees didn’t earn anything like that, they did collect $1.5bn in profit-sharing payments, which averaged almost 21% of their base pay. Some Seattle-area workers pocketed checks for $18,000 (before taxes).

It was also a great year for the auto industry, with nearly 53,000 unionized Ford workers collecting $9,300 apiece, and General Motors paying out a record $11,000 to its hourly workers in profit-sharing, thanks to strong sales of SUVs and trucks.

It’s entirely reasonable to wonder what would happen to existing profit-sharing plans like these, and how they would coexist with ones that companies would create if Clinton were elected and implemented her proposed tax incentive for the very specific kind of plans she has in mind.

More seriously, there’s the question of what might happen if companies try to use profit-sharing plans as a way to give employees de facto higher wages, without actually raising their base pay, and qualify for a tax break in the process. That said, there are few allegations on the part of profit-sharing beneficiaries today that they are being fobbed off with a benefit in lieu of a wage hike, and it’s reasonable to suppose that a new Clinton administration would be looking hard for that kind of abuse.

If there is to be any hope of salvaging some kind of capitalism from the ravages of the greedy 1980s and 1990s; the havoc wreaked by the increasing financialization of the last few decades; and the actions of CEOs from the likes of Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski and Enron’s Jeff Skilling to Stumpf of Wells Fargo, it lies in ideas like profit-sharing.

It’s not a perfect concept, but it can help to get managers and ordinary employees thinking and acting as if they are part of the same team – because they will be. At least the incentives will be on the right side of the scale.

Hamdi Ulukaya, the CEO of Chobani, the yogurt company, earlier this year handed out Chobani shares to all his current employees. These could be worth as much as 10% of his company if the business goes public or is sold, converting to either cash or stock as long as the company continues to hit certain performance metrics.

There are plenty of incentives for employees to ensure the company thrives. If it does, some of them could end up millionaires, in exchange for having had confidence in Ulukaya’s ability to get his startup business off the ground in a very competitive industry.

Regardless of who wins the election and whetherwe end up with a tax policy prompting the creation of corporate profit-sharing plans, one thing is certain: the corporate world needs fewer John Stumpfs, and more Hamdi Ulukayas.