Answering the Call of Automation: How the Labor Market Adjusted to Mechanizing Telephone Operation
James Feigenbaum, Daniel P. Gross · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 22 Feb 2024
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Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
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Abstract
Abstract In the early 1900s, telephone operation was among the most common jobs for American women, and telephone operators were ubiquitous. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T undertook one of the largest automation investments in modern history, replacing operators with mechanical switching technology in over half of the U.S. telephone network. Using variation across U.S. cities in the timing of adoption, we study how this wave of automation affected the labor market for young women. Although automation eliminated most of these jobs, it did not reduce future cohorts’ overall employment: the decline in operators was counteracted by employment growth in middle-skill clerical jobs and lower-skill service jobs, including new categories of work. Using a new genealogy-based census-linking method, we show that incumbent telephone operators were most affected, and a decade later more likely to be in lower-paying occupations or no longer working.
About this publication
Top journal. One of the journals economics departments rank highest: the “top five” economics journals, and the general-science journals Science and Nature.
Placed by: Top five economics journals. How sources are ranked.
- Published
- 2024 (32 months ago)
- Citations
- 40 (OpenAlex)
Citations in context
40 citations — 39th percentile among the 23 indexed papers from 2024 in this collection. Citation counts favor older papers; this compares only same-year papers here, not the whole literature.
□ added to this collection in 2026.
author affiliation matches seed institution boston university — part of why this paper is in the collection.
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