A clerk is a white-collar worker who conducts general office tasks, or a worker who performs similar sales-related tasks in a retail environment. The responsibilities of clerical workers commonly include record keeping, filing, staffing service counters, screening solicitors, and other administrative tasks.
History and etymology
The word clerk is derived from the Latin clericus meaning "cleric" or "clergyman", which is the latinisation of the Greekκληρικός from a word meaning a "lot" and hence an "apportionment" or "area of land". The association derived from mediaeval courts, where writing was mainly entrusted to clergy because most laymen could not read. In this context, the wordclerk meant "scholar". Even today, the term clerk regular designates a type of cleric. The cognate terms in some languages, e.g., Klerk in Dutch, became – at the end of the nineteenth century – restricted to a specific, fairly low rank in the administrative hierarchy.
Clerical workers are perhaps the largest occupational group in the United States. In 2004, there were 3.1 million general office clerks, 1.5 million office administrative supervisors and 4.1 million secretaries. Clerical occupations often do not require a college degree, though some college education or 1 to 2 years in vocational programs are common qualifications. Familiarity with office equipment and certain software programs is also often required. Employers may provide clerical training. In 2006, the median salary for clerks was $23,000, while the nationalmedian income for workers age 25 or older was $33,000. Median salaries ranged from $22,770 for general office clerks to $34,970 for secretaries and $41,030 for administrative supervisors. Clerical workers are considered working class by American sociologists such as William Thompson, Joseph Hickey or James Henslin as they perform highly routinized tasks with relatively little autonomy. Sociologist Dennis Gilbert, argues that the white and blue collar divide has shifted to a divide between professionals, including some semi-professionals, and routinized white collar workers. White collar office supervisors may be considered lower middle class with some secretaries being located in that part of the socio-economic strata where the working and middle classes overlap.
