Clerk

The responsibilities of clerical workers commonly include record keeping, filing, staffing service counters, screening callers, and other administrative tasks.

[2][3] The association derived from medieval courts, where writing was mainly entrusted to clergy because most laymen could not read.

Even today, the term clerk regular designates a type of cleric (one living life according to a rule).

The cognate terms in some languages, notably 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 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.