Sending out an SOS: Save our Secretaries

{"text":[[{"start":4.28,"text":"The days of “take a note, Miss Jones” are long gone. Grant Thornton, one of the UK’s biggest accountancy groups, has axed an estimated 100 UK-based secretaries, outsourcing the roles to India. The stereotype will not be missed, but the job itself might be."}],[{"start":23.27,"text":"Once an office fixture, secretaries have been on the decline since the early 1990s, supplanted by technology and cheaper overseas labour. Numbers in the US have halved over the period, on government data, even as the ranks of managers quadrupled and chief executives grew 10-fold."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":47.17,"text":"Nor is it just the western world. Even Japan’s multitudes of office ladies — a role encompassing everything from making tea to negotiating deals while bosses were on a smoking break that, yes, was most often performed by women — have rapidly dwindled."}],[{"start":66.06,"text":"Institutions geared to furnishing secretarial skills have taken note. Students who once flocked to the Oxford and County Business College saw the popular “Ox and Cow” segue into Oxford Media and Business School. London-based Queen’s Secretarial College in 2007 merged with two similar institutions to offer broader workplace skills."}],[{"start":92.65,"text":"Technology dealt the first blow: computers made it easier for bosses to manage their own correspondence and diaries. Cost-cutting finance directors saw support roles as low-hanging fruit, despite often holding on to their own assistants."}],[{"start":112.09,"text":"Improving technology will further erode the ranks. Apps morphing the spoken word into text, artificial intelligence that can research and write reports and real-time translation all threaten the job security of even the sharpest bilingual executive assistant."}],[{"start":131.32,"text":"Forecasts bear that out. Labour market projections in the UK show that secretaries will see the biggest fall in employment over the next decade of any occupation, with ranks pruned by almost a fifth to a bit over half a million by 2035, according to analysis by the Institute for Employment Studies, based on data from the Department for Employment."}],[{"start":157,"text":"As it is, at many companies the traditional secretary role has shifted into a broader kind of professional assistance. Job mobility is better than it used to be when virtually all moves were horizontal. Some specialised roles are still growing: the US employed almost a fifth more medical secretaries in the first four years of the current decade."}],[{"start":180.75,"text":"Managers, meanwhile, will be no better off. Work, whether outsourced overseas or to AI, requires oversight, creating new chores to replace the old ones. Moreover, secretaries, named for the secrets they keep, have merits that technology cannot yet replicate. They are useful eyes and ears on the ground and know where weak links lie. Losing these attributes could prove a false economy."}],[{"start":216.27,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftmailbox.cn/album/a_1756782756_2025.mp3"}