Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 27, 1990 TAG: 9004270190
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CINDY SKRZYCKI THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Secretaries these days would much prefer a raise for Professional Secretaries Week. A little respect and recognition also would be nice. Or perhaps a chance to climb the corporate ladder instead of holding it.
Increasingly, the nation's 4 million secretaries - overwhelmingly women - are finding ways to signal their unhappiness over key career issues such as pay, opportunities for promotion and the ever-expanding role they are expected to play in offices where technology has displaced typewriters.
"They figure if you are just managing an office, it's not management skills," said Pamela Skellenger, an executive secretary who has been placed in many jobs through a temporary employment agency. "Take us away and watch the office fall apart."
A Gallup poll commissioned by Kansas City-based Professional Secretaries International found that pay and lack of recognition were the two biggest negatives in the profession.
"Our membership is getting more aggressive," said Eileen Lyness, president of PSI, which created Professional Secretaries Week in 1952. "The jobs, the salaries and titles need to change."
Executive secretaries in big cities can command upward of $50,000. But the average pay hovers around $20,640 a year despite the increasing demand for secretaries and their growing importance as technological office wizards, PSI said.
Skellenger, for example, is trained on 15 computer software packages, three financial spreadsheet computer programs, 10 different computers and a dozen printers. With 19 years of experience, she makes about $20,000 a year.
And not all bosses are appreciative.
For this reason, 9to5, a national organization of office workers, is celebrating Secretaries Week with a "good boss/bad boss" contest, said Ellen Bravo, associate director of the group.
Some of the more astounding stories from secretaries include the one about the boss who took a three-day trip and ordered his secretary to move into his house to take care of his kids - as well as go to work. Or the boss who asked his secretary to clip his nose hairs, clean his dentures and scrub a spot out of his tie. And then there was the boss who asked his secretary to screen out all non-white job applicants.
Yet there is a noticeable lack of complaining among veteran professionals.
"Most women want to be the boss," said Ann Zarrella, a secretary at Providence Country Day School in East Providence, R.I. "I don't share that feeling. I'm very content in a secretarial position."
Skellenger is in it not for the money but because she enjoys her job. Maskin thinks Secretaries Week is a waste of time. PSI's Lyness said one New York television station had to cancel a spot on unhappy secretaries because it couldn't find any.
Pay is increasing. In 1982, 2 percent of all secretaries made more than $30,000. Eleven percent do now. Mary Jo Greco, director of the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school's New York campus, said technology, more education and heightened ambition have made secretaries part of the management team.
So what do you give a member of the management team?
PSI and Manpower suggest more training, financial help for education, bonuses, stock in the company or updated office equipment.
by CNB