This picture of the clerk as assistant manager, retainer, confidant, management trainee, and prospective son-in-law can of course be overdrawn. There were clerks—hard-driven copyists in law offices, for example—whose condition and prospects in life were little better than those of dock workers. But by and large, in terms of function, authority, pay, tenure of employment (a clerical position was usually a lifetime post), prospects, not to mention status and even dress, the clerks stood much closer to the employer than to factory labor.
This is underlined by the tiny size of the nineteenth-century clerical groups, The census of 1870 in the United States classified only 82,000or six-tenths of 1 percent of all "gainful workers"—in clerical occupations.\* In Great Britain, the census of 1851 counted some 70,000 to 80,000 clerks, or eight-tenths of 1 percent of the gainfully occupied. By the turn of the century the proportion of clerks in the working population had risen to 4 percent in Great Britain and 3 percent in the United States; in the intervening decades, the clerical working class had begun to be born. By the census of 1961, there were in Britain about 3 million clerks, almost 13 percent of the occupied population; and in the United States in 1970, the clerical classification had risen to more than 14 million workers, almost 18 perċent of the gainfully occupied, making this equal in size, among the gross classifications of the occupational scale, to that of operatives of all sorts.
It must be emphasized, for the sake of avoiding confusion with the common but absolutely meaningless term "white-collar worker," that the clerical classification to which these figures refer and which is discussed in this section includes only such occupations as bookkeeper (generally speaking the highest occupation in this group), secretary, stenographer, cashier, bank teller, file clerk, telephone operator, office machine operator, payroll and timekeeping clerk, postal clerk, receptionist, stock clerk, typist, and the like and it includes these clerical workers no matter where they are employed, in private or in government offices, in manufacturing, trade, banking, insurance, etc.
The creation of a new class of workers, having little continuity with the small and privileged clerical stratum of the past, is emphasized by fundamental changes in two other respects: composition by sex, and relative pay.
The British census of 1851 counted 19 women under the heading of “commercial clerks," and altogether it is estimated that no more than one-tenth of 1 percent of clerks were womenin other words, fewer than 100 of all clerks in the British Isles. In the United States as late as 1900, the clerical classification of under 900,000 persons was still more than three-quarters male. By the censuses of 1961 in Great Britain and 1960 in the United States, the percentage of women had risen in both countries to about two-thirds. And within only another decade in the United States, three-fourths were women: this represented an increase from a little over 200,000 female clerical workers in 1900 to more than 10 million only seventy years later! Male clerical workers, a rapidly declining proportion, are increasingly confined to occupations such as postal clerks and mail carriers, stock clerks and storekeepers, and shipping and receiving clerks.
If we consider the pay scales for clerical labor as compared with the pay of production labor, the change is just as emphatic. According to Lockwood, the lower grades of British clerks in the period 1850 to 1880 were in the per annum range of £75 to £150. Only some 10 to 15 percent of the working class of the time was in that same range, the portion which Lockwood calls a “highly select superaristocracy." We may conclude from this that the pay of clerks began at about the point where the pay of production and transportation workers left off. In the United States, in 1900, clerical employees of steam railroads and in manufacturing establishments had average annual earnings of \$1,011; in the same year, the average annual earnings of workers in these industries was \$435 for manufacturing and \$548 for steam railroads.' And there are other indications that the average pay of the clerical classification was about double the production and transportation workers’ average; in 1899, for example, the average pay of all full-time postal employees was \$955.8
The extent of the change in relative pay scales that has taken place since that time is made clear in a Special Labor Force Report on weekly earnings of full-time workers in the United States, which groups workers by occupation and which was based upon data gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in May 1971.9 According to this report, the median usual weekly wage for full-time clerical work was lower than that in every type of so-called blue-collar work. In fact, it was lower than the median in all urban occupational classifications except service employment:
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\* Occupational statistics more than a half-century old must be viewed with skepticism, since the methods of counting and of classification, apart from their crudity, were often not comparable to those used at present. They must be taken as estimates rather than precise statistics (even modern statistics fall far short of precision, especially when they involve counts and classifications of the low-wage strata). In the present discussion they are used as indicators of relative orders of magnitude, and they are adequate for that purpose.