THE MEASURE OF COMPARATIVE PRODUCTIVENESS 3OI 
the employment manager or the committee which is sup 
posed to assist in the decision is still largely dependent 
upon a set of extremely variable personal opinions. It 
must rely either upon the word of the employee in ques 
tion, or upon general impressions of its own, or upon the 
word of the foreman. In the midst of this conglomeration 
of personal opinions, that of the foreman is bound to have 
the greatest weight, because it has the authority of one 
who is most closely in touch with the employee and who, 
even if he does not know the employee well, is at least 
supposed to know him better than anybody else. 
Most companies endeavor to cast light upon this prob 
lem by computing their percentage of labor turnover, 
and by trying to analyze and interpret this percentage. 
This is a valuable step in determining the degree of agree 
ment between selection and retention. However, up to the 
present time labor-turnover figures have remained very 
largely an unfathomable mystery. Although it has been 
possible to give roughly some of the principal reasons for 
labor turnover, it is generally acknowledged that an 
extremely large proportion of reasons for leaving hinge 
upon personal factors which, in the present scheme of 
things, can never be adequately determined. As long as 
the process of retention is based principally upon a large 
variety of constantly changing personal equations instead 
of upon some standard and impersonal basis, turnover fig 
ures will retain their sphinx-like inscrutability. Many com 
panies have an attendance record and a few are now keep 
ing a record of the work done by each employee; but on 
the whole, these records are still very haphazard and their 
full value is not yet grasped. Nevertheless, such records 
are the greatest single advance in the right direction. In 
order to minimize the errors due to the personal equation,