APPRENTICESHIP

APPRENTICESHIP was a contractual agreement to prepare youth for labor in agriculture or the crafts. During the eighteenth century many occupations began the process of training new practitioners in their "art and mystery" through some form of apprenticeship. Naval officers and blacksmiths, carpenters and domestic servants, and sailors and yeoman farmers all might have begun as apprenticed, indentured laborers. By the end of the twentieth century the practice had become relegated mainly to building trades unions, such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the United Steel Workers of America.

Craft apprenticeship began as a practice of European medieval guilds, which controlled prices and guaranteed the quality of products. Although commercial interests began to weaken the guilds during the sixteenth century, England's 1563 Statute of Artificers made some guild practices national law and ensured that craft apprentice-ships would continue. The statute also required all parents to apprentice their children to a craft or to agriculture if they did not have the resources to bind their children to a profession. The 1601 English Poor Law further bolstered craft apprenticeship by requiring local authorities to bind children whose parents would not. Both of these laws also expanded the practice of indentured apprenticeship to agriculture partly as a response to the thousands of desperate commoners created by the elimination of traditional land rights, an early stage of capitalism. As a result craft and agricultural apprenticeships were both common during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Although the practice of apprenticeship survived immigration to North America, English enforcement measures, such as the guilds, did not. Consequently agricultural and craft apprenticeship indentures were widely used, but the laws governing them had to be enacted locally. Each colony had its own enforcement codes based on the English model. Craft apprenticeship was common in early American cities prior to industrialization, though less so in the South, where enslaved African Americans worked in the crafts more frequently. Indentured agricultural labor was more common in the southern staple crop economies, where it fueled Virginia's first tobacco boom. But even in the South agricultural indentures became less common after the 1670s, when plantation masters began the dramatic shift to enslaving African laborers. Agricultural apprenticeship of white youth ceased altogether after the American Revolution, as servitude became increasingly associated with slavery and blackness.

The craft apprentice's indenture bound master and apprentice to specific obligations and entitlements. Parents, guardians, the courts, and orphanages negotiated indentures on behalf of children, but the documents typically named the master and the child and were signed by both. The agreements entitled the master to full authority over the youth until he or she attained maturity, usually the teens for girls and age twenty-one for boys. Masters promised to teach their trades and to provide shelter and food, usually clothing, and basic education for their apprentices. Contracts stipulated that the child was bound to obey his or her master in all legal circumstances. Eventually boys could expect to become journeymen and, upon completion of their training, to set up a shop of their own. Girls, usually apprenticed to become domestics, seamstresses, or upholsterers, usually expected to marry.

During the eighteenth century North American apprenticeship was transformed by masters, who introduced cash wages and disciplinary measures, and apprentices, who increasingly fled. Benjamin Franklin exemplified both trends. Franklin broke his own apprenticeship to his brother, a printer, in the 1720s by fleeing to Philadelphia and finding work in a printing office as a manager, a specialization masters developed to increase the productivity of their journeymen. Beginning in the 1730s Franklin made his fortune in printing not only through his famous frugality and industry but also by expanding the specialization of tasks and building capital with which to seed other printing enterprises. Franklin's success and celebrity were rare examples, but nothing was unique about these changes, which tended to break up, simplify, and discipline labor rhythms. When Adam Smith, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), extolled the value of the division of labor as the greatest source of "improvement in the productive powers," he acknowledged a process already in motion in Great Britain and North America (Wealth of Nations, p. 7). Claiming that "long apprenticeships are altogether unnecessary," Smith evoked the emerging capitalist ethos Franklin exemplified, and he foreshadowed the final demise of those aspects of craft apprenticeship that had crossed the Atlantic (Wealth of Nations, p. 138).

During the nineteenth century industrialization brought an end to craft apprentices' expectation of becoming shop masters. Between 1820 and the Civil War small manufactories in cities such as New York and Philadelphia began to expand their operations. Many masters lost their shops through competition with others, including former master craftspeople, who became factory owners. The journeymen increasingly could expect a life of wage labor rather than small shop ownership, and apprenticed boys and girls could expect to supply cheap unskilled child labor. Some shops, particularly in trades such as printing, no longer trained novices and beginners to practice a trade. Printers who could write copy, set and ink type, work the press, and bind volumes began to disappear. Specialization reduced the skill-level of many jobs. Unskilled, nonapprenticed, low-wage labor was all many masters of the steam presses of the antebellum period felt they needed.

But industrialization never completely eliminated craft apprenticeship. In 1869 a Massachusetts charitable organization surveyed masters and found that forty-six out of fifty-two had served apprenticeships. Yet these men had served without indentures, the contracts that bound masters and apprentices for a term of years and with specific obligations such as education. Instead they had served for wages at their masters' pleasure. In the post–Civil War era trade unions became the principle defenders and promoters of the apprentice system, insisting on certain ratios of apprentices to journeymen. But the ratios continued to decline, even in the building trades, where apprenticeship persisted through the twentieth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography and Other Writings. Edited by Ormond Seavey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Meldrum, Timothy. Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household. New York: Longman, 2000.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.

Rorabaugh, W. J. The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976 [1904].

Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

JamesSpady

See alsoIndustrial Revolution ; Labor ; Trade Unions .

apprenticeship system of learning a craft or trade from one who is engaged in it and of paying for the instruction by a given number of years of work. The practice was known in ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as in modern Europe and to some extent in the United States. Typically, in medieval Europe, a master craftsman agreed to instruct a young man, to give him shelter, food, and clothing, and to care for him during illness. The apprentice would bind himself to work for the master for a given time. After that time he would become a journeyman, working for a master for wages, or he set up as a master himself. The medieval guilds supervised the relation of master and apprentice and decided the number of apprentices in a given guild. The Industrial Revolution, with its introduction of machinery, put an end to most of these guilds, but apprenticeship continues in highly skilled trades, at times competing with vocational training schools (see vocational education ).

The terms of apprenticeship are regulated by many labor agreements as well as by law. The U.S. system of apprenticeships, established in 1937, is modeled on a 1911 Wisconsin law that named 200 occupations that benefited from apprenticeship programs. Some, such as plumbing and carpentry, required a mandatory apprenticeship period. The passage of the Manpower Development and Training Act in 1962 further encouraged apprenticeship programs. In Great Britain apprenticeship programs sometimes include outside schooling at company expense. The apprenticeship programs in continental Europe today differ from those in Great Britain and the United States by offering training in a wide range of fields, not just the skilled crafts.

Bibliography: See A. Beveridge, Apprenticeship Now (1963); N. F. Duffy, ed., Essays on Apprenticeship (1967); P. Mapp, Women in Apprenticeship (1973).

apprenticeship refers to the period of service as a learner of a trade or handicraft. The apprentice, usually a boy at the beginning of his working life, is bound by a legal agreement to serve an employer for a fixed number of years in which the employer is reciprocally bound to instruct him. The system developed during the Middle Ages when guilds of craftsmen in particular trades, such as silversmiths and shoemakers, established control of their trades by regulating the number of recruits and their training. Contracts, or indentures, were enforced strictly and governed the premium to be paid for learning, the length of the training (usually seven years), and, in some cases, where apprentices lived. The statute of Artificers of 1563 gave magistrates power to compel compliance with apprenticeships. At the end of their apprenticeships trainees became journeymen, fully skilled tradesmen. If they could afford to set up in business they became masters in their own right. Apprenticeships were criticized as a system by which employers were enabled to pay low wages to a person whose skills might have been acquired in a relatively short time. Over time the power of many trade guilds declined and there were changes in the apprenticeship contracts. Amongst the more important was a reduction in the length of time to be served.

Apprenticeship in a wide variety of traditional skilled work continued into the second half of the 20th cent. However, challenges to such ‘training on the job’ combined with expanding provision of formal technical education led to a decline in traditional apprenticeship and the growth of full-and part-time education as a means of entry into skilled work.

Ian John Ernest Keil

apprenticeship refers to the period of service as a learner of a trade or handicraft. The apprentice, usually a boy at the beginning of his working life, was bound by a legal agreement to serve an employer for a fixed number of years during which the employer promised to instruct him. The system developed during the Middle Ages when guilds of craftsmen in particular trades established control of their trades by regulating the number of recruits and their training. The statute of Artificers of 1563 gave magistrates power to compel compliance with apprenticeships. At the end of their apprenticeships trainees became journeymen, fully skilled tradesmen. If they could afford to set up in business they became masters in their own right. Apprenticeship in a wide variety of traditional skilled work continued in the second half of the 20th cent. However, challenges to such ‘training on the job’ combined with expanding provision of formal technical education led to a decline in traditional apprenticeship.