Hello Forked Lightning readers! This is the last installment of my series on the history of technological disruption in the labor market. I sincerely

The Past, Present, and Future of Office Work

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2024-10-25 17:00:10

Hello Forked Lightning readers! This is the last installment of my series on the history of technological disruption in the labor market. I sincerely hope you enjoyed it. After today, I will take a break and start preparing for my next series. It will be about the challenges of U.S. higher education, and I hope to release it in January. I may write occasionally over the next two months about other things.

Welcome back! Last week we talked about the economic importance of communication and the rise and fall of the telephone operator occupation, which mostly employed young women. Between 1910 and 1940, AT&T and its satellite companies rapidly adopted mechanical switching, which quickly put telephone operators out of work. Yet future cohorts weren’t harmed at all. They simply found other jobs, especially as typists and secretaries.

Why did typist and secretary jobs grow so rapidly in the early 1900s? Interestingly, the word “secretary” doesn’t even appear in the U.S. Census occupation descriptions until 1940. Occupation code number 236 in the 1940 Census is described as “stenographers, typists and secretaries.” From 1910 to 1940 it was just “stenographers and typists”, and before 1910 all office work was categorized simply as “clerks and copyists”.