Vacations with pay range from one week to a month, and a number of firms allow two or three months every three years, presumably for the trip to the mainland to tone up, which is a general custom in the islands.
Hours range almost uniformly from 9 a. m. to five p. m.
There is no public stenographic office in Honolulu. Transients and others who have occasional work are dependent on securing an unemployed stenographer haphazard, or having work done in the evening or on Sunday. This works to the disadvantage of both employer and employe, for while the latter may and in some cases does double her regular salary by overtime work, yet the strain on her physique, and especially on her eyes inevitably brings bad results.
Successful stenographers elsewhere make the largest earnings in this field of work, and veritable fortunes have been piled up by some of the large offices who make a specialty of reporting conventions, legislative inquiries, meetings, etc.
A capable stenographer should have High School training or its equivalent; unless exceptionally equipped with English. Even then High School English is desirable and a fund of general information is a valuable asset to those qualifying for secretarial positions. Of the thirty-four stenographers reported as trained in Honolulu, all but eight have such training, which undoubtedly has much to do with the high average of ability.
Seventeen of the entire number reported are Hawaiian or Hawaiian with mixed blood. Nine of the seventeen Hawaiian stenographers are receiving from $900 to $1,600 a year, and have from one to eleven years’ experience. In general their wages average as high or a little higher than those paid other nationalities. The only salaries departing from a normal scale as compared with salaries paid in Honolulu are $10 a week paid a Japanese stenographer in a law office, which is below the average paid for the same length of experience in this class of work; and the salary paid a stenographer in the office of an engineering firm, which is low both for the field of work and for the amount of experience shown. Both stenographers are pronounced capable by their employers.
The nationalities shown in the order of their numerical importance are:
American, Hawaiian, British or Canadian, Portuguese, Portuguese-German, Half-White, (Hawaiian and white), Norwegian-American, Hawaiian-Chinese, Hawaiian-French, Japanese.
It is perhaps too much to expect private teachers to confine their instruction to pupils whose English will qualify them to become efficient stenographers, but if English is found deficient additional instruction should at any rate be suggested. If a stenographer is hopelessly incompetent in English it has often been found possible to persuade her of the inconvenience her incompetence is causing her employer, and of the ill-effect on herself of wasting effort that in another field might make her services valuable. Employers can themselves do much by speaking frankly with a girl in this respect.
Here, too, a vocational bureau would be exceptionally valuable, and would tend to maintain the present satisfactory condition of the stenographic field from the standpoint both of ability of the workers and the pay they receive.