Secretarial Salaries Not Par With Work

Why does N. Elizabeth Fried care so much about the salaries of the nation’s 3.3 million secretaries?

It’s not unusual for most compensation consultants to devote their energies to analyzing the salary and perks of management and top-level executives, because that’s where the money is for them.

Secretarial and support staff compensation often is secondary to the corporate work they do.

But Fried, president of N.E. Fried & Associates Inc., a compensation consulting firm in Dublin, Ohio, always includes secretaries. She regards them as the important professionals they are.

“I care because I was a secretary - that’s how I worked my way through college - and because it’s the one area in salary compensation where you have a female-dominated occupation that is classified differently from any other job class,” said Fried, who also does executive searches and professional speaking.

The consultant has bachelor and master degrees in speech and a doctorate in vocational education from Ohio State University in Columbus.

The difference in the way secretarial salaries and most other wages are determined, Fried points out, is an oldie: Most secretaries still are paid by the status of their boss - not for their own skills and responsibilities.

In Fried’s opinion, the basic question that should be asked, particularly in a time of restructuring and computer technology, is:

How much is a secretary worth?

Though salaries vary by geographical location, she estimates entry-level pay for secretaries averages $21,000 a year; those with three to five years of experience who report to midlevel managers average $27,000; and secretaries to chief executive officers earn $40,000.

According to research by OfficeTeam, administrative assistants and secretaries have a pay range of $19,000 to $33,000 annually; executive assistant secretaries earn $27,000 to $42,750.

I pointed out to Fried that secretaries’ salaries usually do not violate the federal Equal Pay Act because they all get the same low pay. But Fried says the salaries “are not particularly low for the kind of work they’re doing. What has to be looked at is the work they actually do. The status of their manager should not be the primary determinant.

“Technology has really changed the secretary’s job, but it’s simply a tool to be more effective,” she said. “You’re not paid extra for the technology itself, for just keyboarding. But if you wind up doing graphic presentations, helping the manager with editing and presentation - that has to be considered in compensation.”

Finding out exactly what work the secretary does is a key ingredient in offering an equitable salary. “Without the hard data (of what she actually does), there is no way to make that assessment correctly,” said Steven E. Frohman, president of Applied Synergistics Inc., an organizational development firm in Milwaukee.

Fried’s solution has met with some resistance from executive secretaries, some of whom have fewer responsibilities and are higher paid than “lower-level” secretaries.

“Executive secretaries have to recognize that it is what you do, not whom you work for, not your status on mahogany row,” Fried said. “But executive secretaries who have been involved in the analysis and understand the issues do not feel threatened.”

The hardest part of the process, she says, is not getting secretaries to understand, but managers.

“There’s no easy way out,” Fried said. “If you put the lid on this problem, it continues to bubble up.”

And when a fairer pay scale is implemented, she says, her pilot project shows the salaries of executive secretaries do not go down. “But salaries of lower-echelon secretaries, whose wages have been depressed for so long, do increase,” Fried said.

With downsized staffs, employers who want workers to be productive “have to pay people fairly,” she says.

Including secretaries.

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