Automation and the Plight of Young Workers: Evidence from Telephone Operation in the Early 20th Century

Abstract: Telephone operation was one of the most common jobs for young American women in the early 1900s. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T adopted dial service in over half of U.S. telephone exchanges, automating away a legion of operators. We show that upon a city's adoption of dial, the number of young women in subsequent cohorts working as telephone operators immediately and permanently dropped by 50-80%, accounting for 2% of this population's employment. However, the shock did not reduce future cohorts' employment: the decline in demand for operators was instead counteracted by employment growth in other middle-skill white-collar jobs like secretarial work and lower-skill service jobs. Using a new genealogy-based census linking method, we show that existing telephone operators were pushed out of the telephone industry and were more likely to either become operators at private switchboards or leave the labor force entirely. Conditional on working, displaced operators were slightly more likely to be in lower-paying occupations.