Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 81, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1901 — THE SOCIAL SECRETARY. [ARTICLE]

THE SOCIAL SECRETARY.

A Useful Functionary Found in Some Big Department Stores. It is depressing to feel one’s self only one of 500 employes—and not an important one. It is natural that such a feeling should foster a notion that one is being slighted or overburdened or possibly persecuted. When imagination goes to this length work suffers as well as the worker. To save them both some of the great department stores have engaged discreet and tactful women whom they call “social secretaries.” The social secretary is an intermediary between the employer and the saleswoman, and her duty is* to keep them both from making mistakes, says a writer In the Youth’s Companion. She is not expected to overlook wrong-do-ing, but neither is she desired to remain silent when she thinks an employe is unjustly treated. She has authority to send a delicate girl home early on a stormy day. She can recommend a clever girl for promotion. She is qualified to “mother” the sick and encourage the sensitive, and she must be brave enough if occasion arises to tell her employers unpalatable but wholesome truths. We hear of one social secretary who organized among the saleswomen an Insurance club, a mutual benefit association and a social club that arranges for summer outings and ■winter parties. Another hunted up a quiet farmhouse home for girls who were tired or ill. and sent them there, and kept them there until they regained health. But the social secretary’s best is done in meeting the little needs of every day and advising her associates for their physical, intellectual and moral good. “The firm” may seem.remote and inaccessible, but this just and sympathetic woman stands very near. Wherever the experiment has been made, apparently, the social secretary has become a fixture. Efforts like hers profit the employer as well as the employes, because they directly promote that spirit of willing service which adds so much to a worker’s value. Once convinced that she is not held in disdain or viewed as simply a part of a money-making machine—that she is the object of good-will and kindly remembrances—the girl in the department store solves her personal “labor problem” as we all may solve our own, by doing her best work and doing it cheerfully.