They're Either Too Pretty or Too Old

THE SECRETARY SHORTAGE

I NEVER say a good word about my secretary outside the office," says a Chicago lawyer. "If I did, somebody else would have her on his payroll tomorrow." To many U.S. businessmen such caution is normal. Though a record 21 million U.S. women are working, only about 2 million hold secretarial jobs--and only a small percentage are genuine secretaries. As prosperity piles up the paperwork, the shortage becomes more severe; some 250,000 secretarial jobs go begging every day. "We just need bodies," moans a Midwest employment agent. "There haven't been enough secretaries, or even file clerks, for 15 years."

Because of the low birth rate during the Depression, available girl-power--for all jobs--is lower than at any time since the mid-1920s. Today, girls also get married younger (median age: 20), and married working girls quit earlier to have more babies. Moreover, secretarial work no longer has the prestige it had in the 1930s. A woman may now become an engineer, have more fun as an airline stewardess, earn more as a buyer, a librarian, a copywriter. Even some waitresses make $150 a week, double the average secretary's salary with half the strain.

In the fierce competition for talent, businessmen try every trick to find and keep good secretaries. In Chicago, Prudential Insurance Co. even puts its young girl employees to work recruiting their friends, rewards them with one day off (with pay) for each catch. In New York, once a girl agrees to sign up, she may get as much as $70 a week just to come in and learn to be a secretary, can make up to $100 a week when she completes her training, twice what a seasoned secretary got ten years ago. In sprawling Los Angeles some businessmen tack on an extra $25 a week to make up for the inconvenience of working downtown.

Higher pay is not the only lure. Across the country businessmen beg. for secretaries with bristling columns of help-wanted ads, promising prestige ("Your Own Office!"), or glamour ("Handle TV Stars!"), or romance ("Young Execs!"). Many big companies, whose long-set salary and seniority schedules make them less attractive than higher-paying small companies, try to make up the difference with a long string of fringe benefits. After a survey of several score firms in the New York area, the Commerce and Industry Association of New York reported that 78.1% offer profit-sharing plans, 52.7% pay full costs for employees' health and accident insurance. But only the most exquisite melding of money, kindness and men leaves a girl impressed. "Fringe benefits are such old hat," says one employment agent, "that the girls just want to know how many they're getting--not if there are any."

The scramble for secretaries often only compounds businessmen's woes. Because of a general feeling that secretaries over 35 are too set in their ways, too difficult to break into a new job with a new boss, businessmen concentrate on hiring "malleable" younger women. The trouble is that youngsters lack experience, are often unable to keep up with the office work load. Ten years ago a beginner took at least 120 words per minute in shorthand, did 60 in -typing; today, she often takes only about 80 words per minute in shorthand, types 45. Secretarial schools cannot 'boost the standards; company raiders leave them with classrooms half empty long before graduation. Says one Atlanta school director: "Businessmen can't spell themselves, and rarely ever finish a thought. They rely on these so-called secretaries, and are horror-struck when they, discover that the blind are leading the blind."

To solve the problem, some companies are turning to outside contractors who are willing to dip into the big pool of older women that regular employers neglect. Last year, for example, Milwaukee's Manpower. Inc., which has 90 branches in the U.S. and abroad, placed 50,000 such women (average age: 42) in temporary jobs, even used a retired 72-year-old secretary in Boston. Another line of attack is through increasing office mechanization. Standard-Vacuum Oil Co. has recently set up a highly mechanized office in Harrison, N.Y., in which executives can dictate to 24 recording machines in a central transcription room, where expert typists quickly do the work. Yet mechanization is not the final answer. The girls find the work boring and faceless. And a machine can't go out on its lunch hour and buy a birthday present for the boss's wife.

By the 1960s, when the big crop of World War II babies comes of age, vastly expanding the U.S. labor supply, the secretary shortage should solve itself. But meanwhile, businessmen would do well to reassert hiring standards, loosen up on age restrictions. If they fail to do so, they may have forgotten how good a good secretary can be.

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