Running out of time: using job ads to analyse the demand for messengers in the twentieth century

ABSTRACT

Youth labour remained important well into the twentieth century, although it is often elusive in traditional sources. In this article, we investigate messengers – a category of occupational titles, including errand and office boys, which is thought of as youth jobs. We sketch the long-term development of the occupation by making use of digitised Swedish daily newspapers and discuss demand-side, supply-side and institutional factors for the disappearance of the occupation. Our investigation suggests that the messenger jobs reached their peak around 1945 and thereafter decreased to low levels in the 1960s. We find that employers looking for messengers were large organisations that needed in-house help with deliveries and simple office tasks. These employers originally aimed at young men aged 15–17 years. The minimum age requirement was not loosened over time; instead, employers began to announce for older workers. We interpret this as employers’ adapting to a situation where the supply of young messengers had decreased. Employers made their ads appealing by emphasising good working conditions and career prospects, indicating that there was still a demand for messengers despite the changing times.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth jobs
• digitised newspapers
• labour markets
• occupations
• twentieth century

Acknowledgement

Earlier versions of this article draft were presented at the Seminar in History and History Didactics (Malmö University), Seminar at Centre for Work Life and Evaluation Studies (Malmö University), DigitalHistory@Lund (Lund University), and the Workshop ‘Digital Methods in History and Economics’ (Hamburg University, University of Regensburg). The authors would like to thank the seminar and workshop participants for their useful comments. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The national vacancy list was published regularly in the journal Platsjournalen from 1963/1964 to 2017. We have made spot checks of the issues covering the month of October in 1965 and 1970, respectively. Although each issue included 10,000 vacant positions in 1965 and 16,000 in 1970, we hardly found any examples of messenger jobs listed. To all appearances, employers used newspapers or social networks to recruit messengers in mid-twentieth-century Sweden. How the relative importance of network recruitment changed over time is difficult to study. More generally, however, the increasing importance of networks took place long after our period of investigation (see Håkansson & Nilsson, 2019).

2 See Appendix 1 (see supplementary material).

3 Svenska Dagstidningar (https://tidningar.kb.se/).

4 This and the following number have been obtained by spot checks the first weekday in October in every tenth year from 1910 to 1970.

5 As a robustness check, we also searched for two tasks that are associated with messengers: internal post deliveries (intern postgång) and messaging (budskickning). The frequency of these terms showed a downward trend from the mid-1960s onwards.

6 Although errand boy as an occupational title is nowadays mainly associated with young men, we have been careful to include the search terms errand girl (springflick*) since previous research has indicated that there were also many young women in the occupation (Håkansson & Karlsson, 2018; Kommittén för yrkesutbildning åt varubud m. fl., 1949).

7 The search term ‘springflick*’ was not among the most frequent occupational titles. Note however that the occupational title ‘kontorsbud’ is gender neutral.

8 The job ads section (Arbetsmarknaden) of DN was divided into specific categories about the type of jobs demanded, which remained similar from the 1960s until 1980. These included for example ‘engineers, technicians’ (ingenjörer (och) tekniker), ‘clerks, office personnel’ (tjänstemän (och) kontorspersonal), ‘stock and storage personnel’ (lager- och förrådspersonal), ‘security personnel, janitors, messengers’ (bevakningspersonal, vaktmästare/vaktmästeri, bud), ‘transport and communication’ (transporter kommunikationer). We found that the job ad texts become longer and more elaborate since the late 1960s, which slightly reduced the number of ads published. The job titles demanded remained varied: teachers, school janitors, stock personnel, cooks, nannies, nurses.

9 These job ads (kontorsbud) are from 1961 to 1965 and they were looking for male or female workers, or a boy or girl to work in the office.

10 See Section 2, footnote 1.

11 For a full description of the establishment of the Swedish educational system 1940–1975, see Nilsson (2013).

12 Edin et al. (2000) compare the wages of 18- to 19-year-olds with the wages of 35- to 44-year-olds.

13 Own calculations, based on data from Gustafsson and Tasiran (1994, pp. 97–98). The same data shows that the relative wages of 17- to 18-year-olds to 19-year-olds were at remarkably stable levels, around 0.80 from the late 1940s to the late 1980s (when the series ends).