Goodbye Government Girl

ave you nearly screamed in frustration trying to get a live human being on the phone in a government office in the last few years? As a government employee, have you finished an important letter, only to find that you can't get it out for hours or maybe until the next day because your computer printer doesn't work? Have you returned to the office after a long day of meetings, only to find yourself drowning in voice-mail or e-mail messages that you dare not ignore before going home? Have you longed for the days when a secretary-or "government girl" as she was called in many offices-would have dealt with all these problems?

The answers are obvious. So is the reason why. In downsizing between 1993 and 1997, the federal government eliminated 23.7 percent of its civilian clerical workers, according to data provided by the Office of Personnel Management. The official classification of secretary was hit even harder, with 31 percent of those positions eliminated. The number of workers in the four federal clerical classifications fell from 188,779 in 1993 to 143,965 in 1997, a drop of nearly 45,000 jobs. Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review intended to eliminate unnecessary levels of middle management with its downsizing initiative. But OPM statistics show that clerical workers made up 20.5 percent of the 14.4 percent federal workforce reduction between 1993 and 1997.

When it directed agencies to reduce headquarters staffs, NPR did not advise agencies to eliminate secretaries, a spokeswoman for the office says. However, theorists at NPR, now known as the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, believe that even with cuts in clerical staffs, 24-hour-a-day voice mail has improved citizens' ability to contact the government. An OPM spokesman says cuts in clerical positions were appropriate because voice mail, e-mail and computerization have reduced the need for such personnel.

But try telling that to government executives seething over the amount of time they have to take away from professional duties to make travel arrangements and deal with computer problems. Or to the remaining secretaries, who say they are pressured by technical and professional employees who are supposed to do their own secretarial work, but don't know how to get a letter in final form or refuse to pull telephone duty. Or to the citizens who can't get through to a government agency.

Don't expect to hear a lot of talk around Washington about this problem, however. The government secretary has become the job that dare not speak its name. The NPR's downsizing rules specified how many full-time-equivalent slots agencies were supposed to cut, but not which ranks. The easiest way to cut slots was simply to not replace those who quit, and secretaries leave more frequently than professionals. Higher-ups told many executives they should give up their secretaries without a fight or fear for their own jobs, several executives told Government Executive. And secretaries who were offered low-level management positions have not protested the elimination of secretarial positions.

Employees might not dare to speak up, but the public may force the government to address the lack of secretarial and clerical support. So many Americans complained to Congress that they could not get a human being on the telephone at the National Park Service that a provision was included in the year 2000 Interior appropriations bill preventing the Interior and Energy departments and related agencies from using any funds "to operate telephone answering machines during core business hours except in emergency situations."

"The American taxpayer deserves to receive personal attention from public servants," House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, wrote in the bill report.

Banning the use of all voice mail in an agency seems excessive and impractical, but the public outcry may force executive branch officials to confront the question of getting telephones answered throughout government. It also raises the question of whether making government managers who earn $60,000 to $100,000 per year do their own secretarial work is really an efficient use of resources, when such work could be done by clerical and secretarial workers who make $18,000 to $34,000. If Congress and the Clinton administration don't address these problems, the NPR's goal of boosting the public perception of government may fail.

"A lot of the reinvention has proceeded without a plan," says a Justice Department lawyer. "President Clinton says eliminate 100,000 jobs and the agency comes up with a way to do that without thinking about what is needed to get the job done."

The Government Girl

In 1971, the Agriculture Department's Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, which managed farm programs, sent recruiters to high schools in Perryopolis, Pa., and other small towns. Patty Zasadny, who had just completed the school's secretarial course, was invited to move to Washington. "They were really hurting for secretaries," Zasadny recalls. "They tested all the girls who were interested, but everyone else chickened out."

Zasadny joined a migration of talented, skilled and adventurous young women who had been moving from small towns to the nation's capital at least since World War I and had become the backbone of the government's workforce. Sociologists and cultural observers were calling the government's secretaries and other clerical workers "government girls" and recognizing them as more skilled and personally liberated than many of those who stayed at home.

The phenomenon dates back to Sinclair Lewis' 1920 novel, Main Street, in which Carol Kennicutt, the frustrated small town doctor's wife, moves from Gopher Prairie, Minn., to Washington at the end of World War I. She finds employment at the Bureau of War Risk Insurance filing correspondence and answering letters. Kennicutt returns to Minnesota at the end of the novel with more self-esteem after proving she can live on her own and hold a job.

Opponents of government growth during the New Deal and World War II and of the modernization of women's lives found the government girls something of a threat. Washington Confidential, a 1951 book about Washington scandal and mores, said "about 200,000 women work for Uncle Sam" and suggested that after spending days doing mundane tasks they were lonely, sexually promiscuous and had a tendency toward lesbianism. But authors Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer acknowledged that "many are beautiful, their intelligence is beyond the average" and that they got better promotions in the civil service than they would have back home.

Clerical Pileup

Zasadny started in government as a GS-3 four months after she graduated from high school in Perryopolis, and she rose to a GS-7. She has stayed at that level largely, she says, because she found a boss she liked and worked for him for about a dozen years until he retired, rather than seeking promotions. She has been with ASCS, renamed the Farm Service Agency in 1994, for 28 years. Zasadny now works as a division secretary in the Office of the Deputy Administrator for Commodity Operations, which buys agriculture commodities to raise farm incomes and provide food for the school lunch program and the poor in this country and abroad.

Zasadny still loves being a government secretary, but downsizing has taken a lot of the joy out of the secretary's job. Her division used to employ 23 professionals and five secretaries, but now has 24 professionals and two secretaries. At Christmas and during the summers, Zasadny has the help of interns like Danika Lewis, a college student who has no plans to be a secretary or work in the government. Lewis' presence is symbolic of government personnel policy that shows greater interest in recruiting college students for summer jobs than in finding quality applicants for secretarial positions.

The younger generation of government executives type their own documents and correspondence, Zasadny acknowledges, but she must keep track of six computer programs in case they get into trouble trying to finalize orders for food purchases in the many different software programs they use in their work. Covering more telephones has added pressure on Zasadny as well. She believes people who call the federal government should get a human being on the phone and has insisted that secretaries answer the phones in her division. But that standard is difficult to maintain because there are fewer secretaries to relieve the others if one calls in sick, goes to lunch or takes a bathroom break.

Zasadny believes the increase in workload should have brought an increase in grade level. But after two desk audits she has been told "everything I do is for the grade I'm in."

Perhaps worst of all, the job is more impersonal, with much communication via e-mail. "I never see anyone anymore," she says.

Terri Facini, secretary to Deputy Administrator for Commodity Operations Vicki Hicks, agrees that downsizing has made life harder for division secretaries like Zasadny, who are one grade below Facini. "At the division level is where the work is done," Facini says. Her life in the deputy administrator's office hasn't changed as much as Zasadny's, Facini says, but it has gotten more complicated. If Facini or the other secretary in Hicks' office is out and the remaining secretary has to take a break, there's no longer another secretary down the hall to answer the phones. Facini recalls that she once left the phones on voice mail briefly, and the FSA administrator called and left a message "reaming me out," saying that at her level telephones should always be answered in person. Younger executives "say they don't need secretaries and complain the secretaries do nothing, but they feel it is beneath them to answer the phone," Facini notes.

Both Zasadny and Facini, who has been at Agriculture for 29 years, say they stay in their jobs because they have built up many years of government experience and because they think the work their offices do is important. "Millions of people wouldn't be fed if it weren't for this office," Facini says.

Hicks acknowledges that downsizing has increased the work for Zasadny and other division secretaries, but "getting rid of secretaries was the only way to keep from downsizing the program specialist staff," she says. "There is tension between specialists and remaining secretaries," Hicks says. "Division secretaries work for division directors. Lower-level people would like them to do work, but they refuse."

Class System

The elimination of secretaries at the lower levels and their retention at the upper level have been repeated throughout the federal government. "I have to have my voice mail monitored at my level," says one Clinton appointee. A Commerce Department appointee says: "You can't put an undersecretary or assistant secretary on hold while you answer another line or check your calendar."

The fact that office life at the upper-levels has changed little while lower-level offices create most of the paperwork has created a new class system that causes resentment. Many mid-level managers keenly feel the loss of secretaries. Gary Morris, chief of a lab in the Internal Revenue Service's Research Division in Washington, says his boss cut all the secretarial and clerical positions in the division except his own secretary in 1996. Three years later, Morris says, "no catastrophic failures or even minor emergencies have resulted," but there have been "several unintended consequences." There is no longer a single working typewriter on which to type a buck slip or a mailing label, he notes, because no one has ordered the typewriters repaired. Today, he says, all written communication is electronic or handwritten.

Morris says the agency "used to have a dictum: No phone should ring more than three times before it is answered by the nearest person, regardless of rank." But that has gone by the wayside. People who call the main number get a voice mail message that doesn't even identify the party in whose mailbox the message is left.

The division's supply cabinets, which are now organized by "volunteers" from the professional staff, are "a shambles," Morris says. But the biggest loss of all, he says, is the good secretary who was an antenna for the manager. "Because secretaries had frequent contact with-but no authority over-the troops, they often heard the gripes and snipes that a manager doesn't," Morris says. "More than once I was able to approach an upset employee-and seem very sensitive and perceptive for having noticed-and pour oil on troubled waters solely because of a discreet word from my secretary. Now, with work-at-home and all-electronic communication, I must work harder at monitoring the mood of the troops."

Both managers and secretaries say the biggest consequence of eliminating secretaries isn't more difficult management situations but a reduction in service to the public-as in the case of the National Park Service-and to federal employees. One secretary who works for a high-level civil rights official says she has left the office in tears because she has to tell people filing civil rights grievances to call a lower-level office, where calls are answered by voice mail and aren't returned promptly.

It's tough to find any organization that makes secretaries or the jobs they perform a top priority. Groups representing women and minorities in government are more interested in moving women to higher job classifications than in gaining recognition for secretaries. The USDA Graduate School no longer teaches secretarial skills, but a spokesman said its course in leadership skills to make secretaries upwardly mobile is popular.

Federal unions spend as much time fighting to move secretaries to other tracks as they do defending secretarial positions. Most of the secretarial positions have been eliminated by attrition, except at the Defense Department, which offered secretarial buyouts, notes Charles Barnhardt, a labor relations specialist with the American Federation of Government Employees in Washington. Barnhardt says his union, which represents 600,000 employees, gets upset with agencies that prefer to hire younger workers from outside rather than retrain secretaries to move into positions that survived downsizing.

AFGE is also concerned about the working conditions of those secretaries who remain. "Clerical work is one of the most stressful occupations in the workplace. Injuries are more severe than in construction trades and mining," Barnhardt says, "not just carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive-motion injuries, but stress-related illnesses such as heart conditions." And when secretaries at the lower levels are ineffective, or when a program specialist does his or her own typing badly, notes one secretary, it makes the jobs of secretaries at the higher levels longer and harder because they have to read every letter so their bosses won't be embarrassed.

The Future

Both executives and secretaries say there are several steps offices can take to relieve the stress of fewer secretaries-especially if top bosses will allow their secretaries to share the burden. Secretaries say their work would be much easier if executives would answer their phones when they are at their desks, leave up-to-date voice-mail messages about their plans, and return phone calls promptly. One high-level Agriculture Department secretary who sets up meetings that include Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman bemoans the amount of time it takes to set up meetings since the invention of voice mail. "You don't know if people have gone down the hall or are gone for two weeks," she says, adding that in the old days she would arrange the meetings through secretaries or call a secretary in a nearby office if her call wasn't answered.

Government officials defend the elimination of secretarial positions by telling employees that the same thing is happening in the private sector. That's true, but the private sector is much more flexible. Private companies bring in temporaries if they need them to complete a project or call a computer technician. The government uses some temporaries, but union and procurement rules make it harder to bring them in quickly.

Oddly enough, the government is still hiring clerical workers and in some areas of the country paying premium wages because they are tough to find. The U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board reported that, in 1997, more clerical employees-39 percent-were hired through competitive processes than any other occupational category.

But whether the government goes to the same effort it did before to recruit good secretaries is another question. Frank Riley, the human resources director of the Farm Service Agency, says his organization no longer recruits secretaries nationally. Also, many people say most government agencies put little effort into training secretaries. Loretta Gladden, a training specialist at the Agriculture Department's Animal Plant Health and Inspection Service and Agricultural Marketing Service Training Institute, says that as recently as 1989 "we used to having a training program for entry-level clericals-a three-month program where they stayed in-house and had a variety of courses in interpersonal skills, appropriate attire for the office and manners. They even went so far as to teach communication skills with testing in diction from the University of the District of Columbia." Today the institute offers training only for higher-level clerical personnel. "There needs to be training [starting with] that entry level," Gladden says. "A lot of people, especially the younger ones coming out of high school, have no idea how the federal government is supposed to work."

But whether those new hires will remain clericals or secretaries or move into another field is an open question. "People are coming into this field feeling demeaned," Facini says. Many secretaries say moving to a higher grade is difficult. "The lack of recognition to secretaries feeds on itself," says one GS-10 secretary. The younger generation of secretaries, one Commerce Department official notes, "see being a secretary as a step up in the ladder of advancement. They want to become managers." If they don't get promotions, he says, they often file grievances.

Unless government management experts take an interest in the secretarial situation, it won't be addressed until the current crop of top-level secretaries is ready for retirement, according to high-level professionals. "There is a cadre of older black and white women in their 50s and 60s who grew up in another era when to be a secretary was an honorable profession," says one Commerce Department official. "They wanted to be good secretaries, and they are the very best secretaries." When they retire, the official says, government will face a crisis.

One government employee who would have made an excellent executive secretary is Sandra Anglade. A poised, professional woman, Anglade started out as a GS-5 medical secretary at the National Cancer Institute and at one time was an instructor for the secretarial course at the Agriculture Department. But she got bored and was lucky enough to have bosses who saw her potential. Anglade is now a GS-13 and runs the employee recognition program at USDA. "Being a secretary at one of the higher levels can be fulfilling if you apply yourself," Anglade says, but adds she is too close to retirement to go back to that line of work. When the current crop of senior secretaries retire, she says, maybe the government will revert and treat secretaries better.