Government's nine-to-fivers.

• Author: Waldman, Amy
• Position: Federal government secretaries - Includes related article on race and class of the secretaries

For portal to the future, the setting is ruthlessly devoid of glamour: a large, off-white room, harsh neon lights, a buzzing noise of undetermined origin, rows of small, battered desks. In the examining room at the federal government,s office of Personnel Management (OPM), early on a Wednesday morning, some 130 people have come to take the clerical positions exam, a prerequisite for entry-level jobs with the federal government.

A majority of the aspiring clerical workers are female; many are black; most are young. For over an hour, they fill in their name, education, and work experience as a proctor drones instructions from the front Of the room. When it comes time to select their first-choice job, a horizon of possibilities opens before them: telephone operator ... communications clerk ... arts and information clerk ... secretary. "Choose what interests you," the proctor says encouragingly, as if the world lies at their fingertips. "Choose what you think you would like to do."

For decades, employment with the federal government has offered entree not just to the power-seeking elite, but also--through hundreds of thousands of entry-level clerical positions--so people with more limited opportunities. For women with few career options, government clerical jobs historically provided a back door into administrative positions and, ultimately, management. The federal government also preceded the private sector in offering blacks open employment and at least some chance for advancement--the black middle class, especially in Washington, D.C., was built largely through government jobs. hi the District, preparation for the civil service exam was a regular part of high school curricula. Most high school graduates in the area had good shots at landing entry-level positions in the government, and many did.

Even as more Americans began attending college, government still offered white-collar jobs with decent pay, good benefits, and job security to those with only a high school diploma. Jantrice Chappell had a child her senior year at McKinley Technical High School in Washington, D.C.; she was 17. But through the government's Stay-in-School program, she got a job in the Justice Department upon graduation. Today, she has three secretaries under her at the Department of Agriculture.

If Chappell graduated today, however, she might well face a very different situation--a low-paying service-sector job, possibly even unemployment or welfare. For the job titles enumerated on the clerical positions exam are now more tease than truth. Over half the people in the room will pass the test, but most will not get any job at all, let alone the one that sounds most alluring. Currently, 3,200 people who have passed the test are awaiting clerical jobs in the D.C. area. The list grows weekly.

Government hiring nationwide has dropped precipitously, but nowhere has the drop been as dramatic as in the clerical category. hi 1984, clerical positions represented more than 25 percent of all government jobs; by 1994, they had dropped to just under 16 percent. In 1990, 5,943 new clerical workers were hired from the D.C. area--last year only 1,204 were. "I can't remember the last time we hired a clerical person," says Joyce Felder, a human resources official at the Veterans Administration. The State Department had 800 applications for the last clerical position it posted.

At its highest levels, the federal government is ruminating over policies to deal with the "forgotten half"--Americans who have only a high school education and lack the necessary skills to prosper in an information- and technology-based economy. At its lowest ranks, the government is a living microcosm of that plight. Across the country, doors are closing in the faces of those who lack higher education. With the elimination of entry-level clerical jobs, they're closing in government too.

But there are plenty of clerical workers already through the door. In the private sector, many would likely be laid off, much like factory workers replaced by machines. But in the executive branch, civil service protections make mass layoffs next to impossible; barring attrition, this means the government must work with what it has and determine how to make workers with obsolete skills productive in a transformed workplace.

Unfortunately, the way the government manages human resources ties its own hands. The American ideal is that if you work hard, you get ahead; if you don't, you pay the price. But American government runs directly counter to that concept: Outdated personnel structures make it difficult to reward people who work hard, acquire new skills, and take on new tasks. And entrenched civil service protections, and the vociferous unions that enforce them, mean there's little penalty for those who don't make an effort to catch up and contribute. Thousands of civil servants are indifferent to the government's performance because it seems so indifferent to theirs.

Nowhere is this problem more evident, and more complained about, than among the federal government's secretaries--the women who keep the offices running (there are only 400 male secretaries out of some 20,000 in the D.C.-area federal government), and often serve as the buffer between government and the public. Secretaries have always had less at stake in the system than most civil servants. Now, much of their work has been made redundant by automation. In response, too many managers have adopted a philosophy of benign neglect"--preferring to let a secretary do nothing than to figure out how to make her constructive. The result is unproductive employees at a time when government can scarcely afford them, and festering resentment by secretaries already chafing against their second-class status.

Blind to Ambition

Delores Ham and her boss celebrated over lunch the first time she typed a letter for the Secretary of Labor to sign. It was the mid-1960s. Ham was a young high school graduate, who, like thousands of other young women in the District, had gone to work for the federal government as a secretary. It was one of the best opportunities open to a young black woman; but more than that, it was exciting. "There was so much to do, to learn," Ham says. "It was awesome, honey!"

The lunch was recognition of a job--an important job--well done. Secretaries' role in the department's functioning was crucial: Every letter, brief, or report demanded intensive manual labor, particularly in dictation and typing. Making copies required loading carbons into the electric typewriter, and striking the keys hard enough to make sure the letters pressed onto the carbons. A mistake had to be scratched off with a razor blade--on both the original and multiple copies--and then typed over. A missed letter, or editorial changes, meant retyping the entire page, sometimes 10 or more times. Everything was done by hand--secretaries' hands.

Thirty-two years later, Ham is still a secretary, still at the Labor Department, but she is decidedly less central to the government's workings. The day I interviewed her, she arrived at work at 2:30 p.m. and went straight to a union meeting for the rest of the day. The department did not come toppling down. In fact, no one seemed to notice.

During Ham's tenure in government, the world shifted beneath her feet, and she did not shift with it. Copying by carbon, stenography, typing--all have given way to Xerox machines and faxes and a computer on...