Computer Chips and Paper Clips Technology and Women's Employment, Volume II: Case Studies and Policy Perspectives (1987) / Chapter Skim
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Recent Trends in Clerical Employment: The Impact of Technological Change
Recent Trends in Clerical Employment: The Impact of Technological Change
Pages 223-267
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From page 223... ...
Generally people associate the traditional office occupations with the term "clerical." Indeed, secretaries, typists, stenographers, file clerks, office machine operators, and receptionists do make up a large proportion of all clerical workers. But bookkeepers and bank tellers are also clerical workers according to the Bureau of the Census, as are bill collectors, insurance adjusters, postal carriers, factory expediters, and most enumerators and interviewers.
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From page 224... ...
Source: Hunt and Hunt (1986~; based on 1940-1980 census data. of clerical workers in total employment has doubled in the last 40 years, from just under 1 employee in 10 in 1940 to 1 in 5 by 1980.
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From page 225... ...
Between 1950 and 1980, the proportion of women workers who worked in clerical jobs grew from about 27 percent to over 35 percent. Thus, the sex segregation of clerical occupations appears to have been increasing, although there was very little increase in the proportion of females employed as clerical workers between 1970 and 1980.i The participation rate for men in clerical work was only 7.6 percent in 1980.
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From page 226... ...
Evidence of the direct impact of technological change on office employment levels is sought for the finance and insurance industry, reputedly the most advanced user of office automation systems. This paper does not try to assess the influence of other important factors that will determine future labor market outcomes for clerical workers.
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From page 227... ...
These figures are based on data from the decennial censuses, and although they are far from perfect, everything that can be done has been done to maximize the consistency of the estimates and minimize the distortions introduced by the measurement system and changes in it.4 Table 1 shows that there were just over 19 million clerical workers employed in 1980 in 42 separate clerical occupations ranging from secretary, the largest, to tabulating machine operator, the smallest. There were more than 4 million secretaries employed in 1980; they represented just over 4 Because these data have been adjusted rather extensively for consistency, the figures reported here do not correspond exactly with census figures from other sources.
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From page 228... ...
228 Go Go ·~ E o :^ CC of Go o To US o ._ As o rS ·O v ·_ >.
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229 ~ Cat .
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From page 230... ...
This occupation has grown from an employment level of 868 persons in 1950 at the dawn of the computer age to nearly 400,000 persons in 1980, an annual rate of growth of over 22 percent. This is the labor market expression of the computer revolution, which began to substantially affect employment levels in computer-related occupations in the 1960s.
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From page 231... ...
There were also a few clerical occupations that showed absolute declines during this Midyear period. The most rapid declines were among stenographers and telegraph operators, declining in employment by about 5 percent annually.
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From page 232... ...
Figure 2 shows aggregate clerical employment as a proportion of total employment on an annual basis from 1958 to 1984. It clearly shows that the rate of increase of clerical workers relative to all employment was much slower in the 1970s than it was in the 1960s.5 Even more apparent is the stagnation in the proportion of clerical workers since 1980.
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From page 233... ...
Table 2 shows the CPS clerical occupations sorted by the annual rate of change over the 1972-1982 decade. As in the decennial data for 1950 to 1980, computer and peripheral equipment operators experienced the most rapid rate of increase of any clerical occupation, although it^was only about half the average annual rate shown for the 1950-1980 period.
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234 ~ be ~ V en Go o Be.
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From page 235... ...
235 u~ ~ ~ ~ ~ r~ c~ 0 oo co ~ ~ co ~ oo co oo c~ .
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From page 236... ...
DETERMINANTS OF CLERICAL EMPLOYMENT Analysis of the trends in occupational employment indicated that some clerical jobs were growing while others were declining. On an aggregate basis, it was seen that clerical jobs as a whole were becoming relatively more important as a proportion of total jobs in the economy, although that growth slowed in the 1970s.
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From page 237... ...
During recessionary periods it is not unusual for the lack of jobs to be blamed on labor-saving technology, and office automation is a case in point. However, productivity growth and GNP growth are actually intertwined: productivity gains allow the possibility of economic growth.
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From page 238... ...
(The staffing ratios of all occupations within an industry must sum to one; shown as percents, they must sum to 100.) According to Table 3, the finance industry shows the highest percentage of clerical workers; nearly 45 percent of all employees in this industry are clerical workers.
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From page 239... ...
The absolute number of clerical jobs in each of the major industries is also presented in Table 3. About 5.5 million clerical workers can be found in the service industry.
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From page 240... ...
We can also see the importance of banking and insurance, the two largest sectors within finance in terms of clerical employment. Finally, clerical jobs are important in a variety of service sector industries, from business services to personal services.
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From page 241... ...
Source: Hunt and Hunt (1986~; [based on 1958-1984 BLS data. Since industry employment is so crucial to occupational employment levels, the trends over the last 27 years in industry employment are presented in Figure 3 and Table 5.
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From page 242... ...
242 A :^ o v o so U3 ~4 C
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From page 243... ...
All three of these sectors have staffing ratios for clerical workers in excess of 50 percent, the highest of all industries. Insurance employment grew at about the economywide average until about 1974, then began to accelerate, and outdistanced the national economy in job growth thereafter (except for 1984~.
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From page 244... ...
Thus, it is impossible to estimate the productivity gains specifically attributable to clerical workers utilizing various types of electronic office technology.8 One simple approach to examining the productivity gains from office automation is to study those sectors that are significant employers of clerical workers and that are also believed to be leaders in office automation. The broad industrial sector of finance and insurance is the recognized leader in the field of office automation, data.
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From page 245... ...
It should be emphasized that these are not measures of the productivity gains for clerical workers nor can these gains be attributed to office automation. They are industry-wide measures for output gains due to all improvements across all employees.
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From page 246... ...
In fact, investment per employee virtually exploded, growing a little more than five times the average for all private nonfarm employment after 1966-1967.~° Although there is no doubt that the finance and insurance industries are investing heavily in new capital equipment, it is less certain that they are investing in office automation. What can be concluded is that the dramatic growth in investment in finance and insurance has not resulted in measurable labor productivity gains to date.
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From page 247... ...
Although formal case studies of the economic impacts of office automation are generally lacking, there is fragmentary information that casts doubt on the most wildly optimistic productivity claims of advocates of it There are serious concerns about the quality of the aggregate data (see Hunt and Hunt, 1985~. BLS has constructed special productivity indexes in banking, measuring output as services rendered and labor input as actual hours worked.
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From page 248... ...
designed to be guides for managers interested in improving productivity through office automation contain surprisingly few references to the actual experiences of firms or to the productivity gains that managers can reasonably hope to achieve with office automation. For instance, Katzan includes an entire chapter on word processing, but provides no hint about the likely potential productivity gains.
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From page 249... ...
, which may be the information industry's largest market research and consulting firm, has repeatedly stressed that the labor productivity gains from office automation fall far short of justifying the purchase of the equipment. According to IDC (1984, 1983, 1982)
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From page 250... ...
, Intensive. First, one of the most obvious reasons that office automation may not have created measurable productivity gains industry-wide is that the diffusion of the technology may not have proceeded nearly as far as implied by the popular media.
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From page 251... ...
A deepening of capital may be occurring as products and services become more information intensive and new products and services are developed. Office automation may represent simply additional capital support for office workers rather than capital substitution for labor.
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From page 252... ...
If the net effect of office automation is the displacement of clerical jobs, over time clerical staffing ratios will fall. In the following discussion, an analytical tool is used to summarize the effects of all three factors.
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From page 253... ...
The decomposition methodology provides another, more systematic opportunity to assess the technological influence of office automation on clerical jobs. In general, changing staffing ratios are probably the most visible manifestation of the specific ejects of technological change on occupational employment.
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From page 254... ...
SOURCE: Calculated by the authors, based on data from the Current Population Sunrey. The results of the decomposition for the major occupational group of clerical workers are presented in Table 6.
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From page 255... ...
The bottom row in Table 6 indicates that the bulk of all new clerical jobs, a little more than 3 million, were added as a consequence of the overall growth of the economy; another 625,000 clerical jobs were added because clerical workers were more prevalent in industries that were growing faster than the average for all industries (the factor labeled differential rates of industry growth in the table) ; finally, 466,000 clerical jobs were added because of increasing staffing ratios for clerical jobs; that amounts to 3.3 percent of the 1972 employment level for clerical workers.
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From page 256... ...
It is possible that office automation is raising the productivity of clerical workers, contributing to the falling staffing ratios in those sectors, and thereby negatively impacting clerical jobs. It is puzzling that the aggregate productivity data for finance and insurance showed below-average productivity growth for the sector as a whole, yet the decomposition analysis showed declining staging ratios for clerical jobs within finance and insurance.
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From page 257... ...
Changing staffing ratios, probably the most visible manifestation of the specific effects of technological change on occupational employment, had a moderately positive effect on the employment growth of clerical workers from 1972 to 1982, creating about 450,000 new clerical jobs (compared to about 3 million created by aggregate economic growth and 600,000 by the concentration of clerical workers in rapidly growing industries)
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From page 258... ...
In fact, all the existing forecasts of employment in clerical occupations are unanimous in predicting that staffing ratios for clerical jobs will decline in the years ahead, presumably because of office automation. The fall in staffing ratios anticipated by BI`S is modest compared with other predictions.
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From page 259... ...
Again a world of both high tech and high touch is anticipated. Roessner et al., Drennan, and Leontief and Duchin all conclude that office automation will have a much greater negative impact on clerical jobs than the BES predicts, with Leontief-Duchin and Roessner et al.
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From page 260... ...
This is not simply a function of the changing composition of demand but relates to the ingredients for a standard unit of output. To the extent that this trend continues in the future, it implies that office automation may have less impact on clerical employment levels than anticipated by some researchers.
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From page 261... ...
Finally, Leontie£Duchin and Roessner et al. appear to us to be truly overoptimistic technologically, both in terms of what office automation equipment can do and in the speed of diffusion of that equipment.
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From page 262... ...
Finally, office automation is likely to at least contribute to the slowing of employment growth in these occupations in the future. We think that the overall growth of clerical jobs in the future will be average to slightly below average.
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From page 263... ...
Therefore, even allowing for negative employment impacts from office automation, the growth of this large, diverse, and diffused major occupational group should not be much below the average growth for all occupations for the next decade. Many commentators believe that back-office clerical jobs will disapppear.
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From page 264... ...
Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association 1985 The Computer and Brained Equipment Industry Marketing Data Book. Washington, D.C.: Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association.
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From page 265... ...
Perry Schwartz, and Keith R Nelms 1985 The Impact of Office Automation on Clerical Employment, 19852000: Forecasting Techniques and Plausible Futures in Banking and Insurance.
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From page 266... ...
Columbia University, New York. Office of Economic Growth and Employment Projections 1981 Projected Occupational Staffing Patterns of Industries.
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From page 267... ...
Lukasiewicz, and Marcus E Einstein 1983 Occupational employment projections through 1995.
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