PERSONNEL DEPORTMENT : In Its 65-Year History, Costa Mesa-Based Journal Has Evolved Into a Glossy Repository of Up-to-Date Management Wisdom

The year was 1925, the topic was a study on women in the workplace, and the conclusion was bad news for the flappers in the factories.

“Women may be intellectually competent to undertake any and all vocations,” was the grudging admission of one article on the study. But officials at the Ohio rubber plant where the inquiry was conducted “decided that salaried women employees do not deserve the same pay as men, even when they hold the same kinds of positions.”

It was an early salvo in the modern war over equal pay for equal work, and it was fired in the Journal of Personnel Research--a periodical started three years earlier as a voice for the infant personnel industry.

Fortunately for working women, the nation and the industry have changed somewhat since then.

So has the magazine. In 65 years of publication, the Journal of Personnel Research has evolved from a quarterly that addressed such weighty topics as “blond and brunette traits” and “height and weight as factors in salesmanship,” into the Costa Mesa-based Personnel Journal, a thick, glossy repository of up-to-date management wisdom.

Mirror of Workplace

Throughout its transformation, the magazine has served as a mirror of the U.S. workplace, reflecting the major issues of the times and their effects on the corporate world: the Depression in the 1930s; World War II in the 1940s; civil rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s; acquired immune deficiency syndrome and immigration reform in the 1980s.

But the basic focus of this family-run magazine has remained the same, because “the issues of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work don’t change,” said Margaret Magnus, the junior partner in the mother-daughter team that runs the journal.

Those issues are at the crux of personnel management, and they fill the pages of Personnel Journal, which is the oldest and one of the largest continuously published periodicals in the country covering industrial relations and human resources.

“Personnel Journal is crisp, practical, topical stuff,” said Richard E. Sells, president of the Employment Mangement Assn. “They do some weighty articles from time to time, although they are more current affairs and late-breaking news and ideas. It’s certainly well read.”

The magazine started out in New York and made sojourns to Swarthmore, Pa., and Santa Monica before making its final home in Costa Mesa in 1978. Arthur C. Crofts, for whom its parent company is named, was editor and publisher in 1960-75, when Publisher Betty Hartzell--Croft’s niece and Magnus’ mother--took the helm.

To Magnus, the journal’s editor and associate publisher, “personnel” is a catch-all term that includes “everything that happens to an employee from the moment he or she steps through the door of the company: resume, interview, orientation, training, reviews, benefits, transfers, grievances, retirement.”

As such, the personnel industry is a product of the 20th Century, a time when workers flocked from fields to factories to fill the demands of an increasingly automated work world. It is an industry born alongside the Industrial Revolution and the union movement, steam engines and worker protest.

In its earliest incarnation, personnel was a discipline designed to understand and manipulate the growing urban work force, industry experts say; by mid-century it had changed into something of a corporate graveyard, where once-proud managers were sent to retire.

Today, however, it is a $35-billion-a-year industry, complete with software, scores of publications and a burgeoning army of “personnel managers,” which no company with more than 100 workers could manage without.

At the heart of this transformation is an increasingly complex world and a growing body of legislation governing the public and private workplace.

“It used to be you came in, punched a time clock and got compensated,” Hartzell said. “But the days of the payroll clerk, who’d take the time off the time clock and pay it, are long gone. . . . Workers used to get insurance and sick leave and that’s it. Now there are cafeteria benefits, employee fitness programs, child care.”

From 1962 to 1982 alone, the number of employees and managers involved in personnel and industrial relations work has increased from 113,000 to 423,000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Nearly 160 universities and colleges offer advanced degrees in personnel and labor specialties, more than 150 newsletters and magazines address these issues and 95 groups provide support for the wide array of personnel professionals.

The pages of the magazine, which has a paid circulation of about 29,000, are filled with ads for health care systems and relocation assistance, resume-check services and training films--goods and services that did not exist a decade or two ago.

“In the early 1980s, the industry was poised for growth and so was our competition,” Magnus said. “We will end this year with the largest market share--49% to 50%--of all four major magazines: Personnel Journal; Personnel Administrator; Personnel; Training and Development Journal.”

One close competitor is Personnel, the official publication of the American Management Assn., which has been published for 64 years and has a paid circulation of about 20,000, said William Wagel, Personnel’s managing editor. Wagel admits Personnel Journal has more advertising than his own periodical but maintains that “we (Personnel) have stronger editorial content.”

In the industry’s early years, rapid growth was far from assured. The early 1920s were personnel’s first boom years, according to Hartzell, when thousands of military men flooded home and had to be reabsorbed into the work force.

Hit by Depression

But then the Depression hit, devastating the nation and creating an uncertain future for a fledgling industry that could have died, along with other luxuries of better times.

“A more searching test of industrial relations activities than the business depression which began in 1929 could hardly be contrived,” said an article published in the magazine’s edition of January, 1935. “A prolonged recession in business activity, covering not months but years, and the necessity to curtail drastically all operating expenses, provided ample justification for discarding any features of industrial policy that had not fully proven themselves.”

The National Industrial Conference Board surveyed 233 businesses on the health of the personnel industry, listing 100 types of employee benefit administered by personnel officers and asking which companies had them before the Crash and which had them after six years of economic disaster.

The results, as reported in the journal, were dramatic: “Forty-one companies had formal pension plans, and only three had been dropped during the Depression,” the survey said. “Group life insurance was carried on by 162 companies. Two had dropped it during the Depression.”

Not surprisingly, though, more than half of the employee stock plans offered by the companies surveyed had bitten the dust in the six years after the original Black Monday: “Employee stock purchase plans were in effect in 24 companies, as compared with 25 in which they had been discontinued.”

The calm after World War II was the second big test for the personnel business; it too made its mark on Personnel Journal. During the war, workers migrated from their homes, seeking employment and high wages in defense plants. Their peacetime work had disappeared, and their wartime work was soon to end.

Peacetime Economy

“There will be a period after V-E Day, another after V-J Day, and then we will swing into full peacetime economy,” the journal reported in 1945. “Those now doing the work that will continue in peacetime probably will be the best off. Those engaged in work that ends with the war must change jobs and will be in a weaker position. . . . Job insecurity may become a national as well as personal hysteria.”

Another concern revolved around returning veterans. In 1945, the magazine predicted that, “Some will come back with physical handicaps; others will have mental and emotional maladjustments; some will be looking for the ‘big money’ that war workers earned; and others will have a hero complex.”

But it was the 1960s and 1970s that brought the personnel industry its greatest growth, Magnus and Hartzell contend, as personnel officers were hired to interpret and implement a wealth of legislation designed to make--or at least try to make-- the workplace more equitable.

One 1968 editorial on “workplace ghettos” said: “The professions are as segregated as they were in 1900, if not more so. Such traditionally male-dominated professions as medicine, for example, actually have fewer women today. The only integration is occurring in traditionally female professions: Men are moving into teaching and nursing.”

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one attempt at righting those wrongs, by forbidding employers, employment agencies and labor unions from discriminating against employees, or potential employees, based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.

After Title VII came the Age Discrimination Employment Act of 1967, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. In 1962-72, the number of personnel workers grew from 113,000 to 310,000, according to Department of Labor statistics.

Era of Great Change

That era was one of great change for Personnel Journal, too. For starters, it began accepting ads for the first time. In 1974, the magazine’s parent company, A.C. Croft & Associates, flirted with bankruptcy, Hartzell said, because its less successful publications were draining profits from the healthy journal.

Hartzell, who came to the journal that year, scaled the company back, cut out the losing periodicals and turned Crofts around within a year. Although she refuses to disclose the company’s revenues, Hartzell said the journal has continued to be healthy and employs 16 people.

“In 1987, we will have published more pages than at any point in the history of the magazine,” Hartzell said. “Ad revenues are up 22% in 1987.”

With a list of contributing authors that has included American Federation of Labor leader Samuel Gompers, one-time Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and pollster George Gallup, Personnel Journal also enjoys a healthy respect within the industry it covers.

‘Excellent Articles’

“I think Personnel Journal is an excellent practitioner’s journal in the sense that it really provides human resources professionals in the field with easy-to-read yet excellent articles,” said Douglas McCabe, associate professor of human resources management at Georgetown University’s School of Business Administration.

Dalmas Nelson, a professor of political science at the University of Utah, specializes in public personnel administration. Nelson characterized the journal as “respected, sort of a semi-scholarly magazine, but good” and said two bonuses come with the $45 subscription fee. Useful information is one. “A prestige aura” is another.

“Many offices like an aura of scholarly sophistication,” Nelson said. “It sort of dresses up the place to have something like that on the coffee table. I’m not arguing that these are not read, though. They are.”

Today, after nearly seven decades of publication, Personnel Journal continues to keep those readers informed, this time with talk of mental health and immigration reform, ethics and AIDS.

The journal has set up an “AIDS In the Workplace Information Clearinghouse” to provide employers with information on education, insurance, legal and employer policy issues associated with the disease. Through the clearinghouse, companies and organizations can tap a database of AIDS information and resources nationwide. In January, Canadian resources will also be available.

In addition, recent national surveys published in the magazine have shown that:

- Middle managers 40-45 years old are the most likely of all employees to show tendencies toward unethical behavior, largely because of “the desire to ‘make it’ before it’s too late.”

- Drug abuse in the workplace is on the upswing; 95% of employers surveyed reported abuse problems, contrasted with just 36% in 1971.

- Six out of 10 corporate personnel executives surveyed favor increasing the current minimum wage of $3.35 per hour but believe that the wage should be “based on supply and demand rather than artificial government pricing.”

Currency is only half of Personnel Journal’s success, its publisher and editor contend. The rest is being on top of tomorrow’s issues. Its first AIDS-in-the-workplace article, for example, was printed in 1982, in the early stages of widespread concern about the disease.

To Hartzell and Magnus, the major issues facing U.S. workers in the next five years--and the magazine the two women publish monthly--surprisingly fall within the realm of concerns usually cared for by government agencies, things like full employment, elder care, and literacy.

“We had (President) Johnson’s War on Poverty, and it didn’t quite work,” Magnus said. “Now we’re going to turn around and say it’s business’ job to take social responsibility.”