"Some people believe that the function of an employment department is merely to keep in touch with the labor market and engage employees," he continued. "This is erroneous. The duty of this employment department is to raise the standard of efficiency of the whole working force by the proper selection, placing, following up and promotion of employees and so bringing about a condition that will result in their rendering as nearly as possible one hundred per cent. service to the store. That is the real reason why employment departments such as this first came into existence. Business some years ago awoke to the realization of the fact that its indiscriminate handling of the entire labor problem was causing a tremendous economic waste, not alone to the employee and to society, but to itself. It then began for the first time to deal with the problem of its personnel in a scientific and practical way." The market for workers--like pretty nearly every other sort of market--is, as we have just seen, subject to fluctuations; there are seasons when the employment manager--ranking as the store's fourth assistant general manager--must look sharply about him for the maintenance of its ranks, other seasons when long files of would-be workers present themselves each morning at his department doors. For the five or six years of the World War period the first set of conditions prevailed. It was difficult for any department-store, ranked by the Washington authorities in war days as a non-essential industry, always to maintain its full working force, to say nothing of its morale. Recently the pendulum has swung in the other direction. America is not exempt from the labor conditions which are prevailing in the other great nations of the world. And there are plenty of people who would work in Macy's. Yet the store has refused to use this situation as a club over its workers. Throughout the darkest days of the business depression it told them that it had no intention either of reducing its force of workers (beyond the usual lay-off of extra Christmas people) or of reducing their individual salaries. Which was a considerable help to its _Esprit de corps_. Yet even in the hardest days of labor shortage Macy's never ceased to be most particular as to the quality of its help. Applicants for positions underneath its roof were scrutinized with great care to make sure as to their desirability as additions to the organization. And before they finally were accepted and turned over to the training school, they were examined, with as much thoroughness as if there were hundreds of others in the file behind them, from whom the store might pick and choose.