Full Citation
Title: Automation and the Fate of Young Workers: Evidence from Telephone Operation in the Early 20th Century
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI: 10.3386/w28061
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Abstract: Telephone operation, one of the most common jobs for young American women in the early 1900s, provided hundreds of thousands of female workers a pathway into the labor force. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T adopted mechanical switching technology in more than half of the U.S. telephone network, replacing manual operation. We show that although automation eliminated most of these jobs, it did not affect future cohorts' overall employment: the decline in demand for operators was counteracted by growth in both middle-skill jobs like secretarial work and lower-skill service jobs, which absorbed future generations. Using a new genealogy-based census linking method, we show that incumbent telephone operators were most impacted by automation, and a decade later were more likely to be in lower-paying occupations or have left the labor force entirely.
Url: http://www.nber.org/papers/w28061
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Feigenbaum, James; Gross, Daniel P
Series Title: NBERWorking Paper Series
Publication Number: 28061
Institution: National Bureau of Economic Research
Pages: 1-112
Publisher Location:
Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Population Data Science
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