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Why Apprenticeship Persisted in Britain But Not in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Bernard Elbaum
Bernard Elbaum
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064.
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Extract

During the nineteenth century, under free labor market contracting, apprenticeship persisted in Britain but declined in the United States. This article argues that apprenticeship endured in Britain because of its efficiency advantages and because of customs, inherited from the guilds, that favored training certification for entry into skilled jobs. By contrast, within the United States guild traditions were weaker, occupational certification was seldom required, and, as a result, indenture obligations were hard to enforce. Understandably, U.S. employers refrained from making training investments in potentially mobile apprentices.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 337 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1989

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References

1 Reubens, Beatrice G., Apprenticeship in Foreign Countries, U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, R&D Monograph 77, 1980.Google Scholar

2 Katz, Michael, Doucet, Michael, and Stern, Mark. The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA, 1982), pp. 367–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Lebergott, Stanley, The Americans: An Economic Record (New York, 1984), p. 372. Lebergott very briefly offers much the same line of argument as does this article.Google Scholar

4 Information on modern apprenticeship is from Great Britain, Ministry of Labor, Report on Apprenticeship in 1925–1926 (London, 1927–1928), vol. 7.Google Scholar

5 Great Britain, Board of Trade, Report of an Enquiry by the Board of Trade into the Condition of Apprenticeship and Industrial Training, printed but not published. 1915 (a copy is available at the British Library of Social and Political Science), p. 55;Google Scholar cited in More, Charles, Skill and the English Working Class, 1870–1914 (London, 1980). p. 77.Google Scholar

6 Ministry of Labor, Report on Apprenticeship in 1925–26, vol. 7, p. 61, presents data from firms it calls “representative.” They are in fact much larger in size than the average. Board of Trade, Report on Apprenticeship in 1909, p. 55; cited in More, Skill and the English Working Class, p. 76. Ryan, Paul, “Apprenticeship and Industrial Relations in British Engineering: The Early Interwar Period,” draft paper, King's College. Cambridge University, p. 14.Google ScholarReport of the Committee of Inquiry under Professor E. H. Phelps Brown into Certain Matters Concerning Labor in Building and Civil Engineering, Cd. 3714 (London, 1968), p. 42.Google Scholar

7 Supporting data is from Ministry of Labor, Report on Apprenticeship in 1925–26, vols. 2 and 6; Ryan, “Apprenticeship and Industrial Relations in British Engineering,” pp. 8–16.Google Scholar For a fuller discussion see Elbaum, Bernard, “The Historical Persistence of Apprenticeship in Britain,” draft paper, Economics Department, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar

8 Butler, C. Violet, Social Conditions in Oxford (London, 1914), p. 53;Google Scholar cited in Gillis, John R., Youth and History (New York, 1981), p. 123.Google Scholar

9 I calculated internal rates of return to apprenticeship training on the assumption that individuals earned the average adult wage for their respective skill category after age 21 (for the unskilled and semi-skilled) or age 22 (for the skilled, since time-served apprentices commonly served one-year improverships). 1 used 1906 prevailing wage figures by skill level from Routh, Guy, Occupation and Pay in Great Britain, 1906–79 (2nd edn., London, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For youths under age 21, I assumed that inter-quartile earnings distributions from Britain, Great, Board of Trade, Report of an Enquiry into Earnings and Hours of Labor in the U.K. in 1906, cd. 5814 (London, 1911), represented alternative earnings progressions over time. So computed, internal rates of return to apprenticeship training were very high, some 21 percent compared with youths who obtained semi-skilled wages over their entire adult career, and 27 percent compared with those who received unskilled wages. In fact, for individual craft occupations, data from the Board of Trade's 1906 Earnings Enquiry indicates very little earnings variation within regions. For unskilled and semi-skilled workers, my assumptions are generous. Presumably their earnings increased with age and experience, so that in actuality they attained the average pay for their skill category only later in life, when its value would be more heavily discounted. Data from the Ministry of Labor's Report on Apprenticeship in 1925–26 also indicate that experience was by far the most important source of intra-industry variation in apprentice earnings. To be conservative, my estimates compare the prospective career earnings of other youths with those of engineering apprentices on time rates–one of the lowest-paid apprentice groups in 1906. I computed the prevailing pay of other youths by two methods. In one I simply took the employment-weighted average of earnings quartiles. In the other I found by iteration the “prevailing” earnings level for which there were approximately equal-sized groups (by employment) with significantly greater and lesser earnings, the remainder of youths having quartile earnings insignificantly different from the “prevailing” level. The latter method yielded somewhat greater estimates of training costs than the former. Performing significance tests on quartile data is a nonstandard problem of statistical inference. I am indebted to my colleague Ray Shine Lee for developing a suitable test statistic, which was based on the assumption that the underlying wage distributions were log normal.Google Scholar

10 Ryan, “Apprenticeship and Industrial Relations,” finds that approximately half the interregional variation in EEF journeyman-to-apprentice employment ratios can be explained in terms of apprentice pay relative to that of journeymen.Google Scholar

11 Dearle, N. B., Industrial Training (London, 1914), p. 253;Google ScholarMinistry of Labor, Report on Apprenticeship, vol. 7, p. 8.Google Scholar

12 Computed from data in Ministry of Labor, Report on Apprenticeship in 1925–26, vol. 7, pp. 81, 116, 180, and from Routh, Occupation and Pay, pp. 99–101. For elaboration, see Elbaum, “The Historical Persistence of Apprenticeship in Britain.”Google Scholar

13 See fn. 9.Google Scholar

14 Training costs are estimated on the assumption that they were, at the outset of indenture, equal to the wage differential initially prevailing between apprentices and other youths, and subsequently increased at a constant annual rate, summing to total discounted forgone earnings.Google Scholar

15 See More, Skill and the English Working Class, p. 43. for reference to a case where apprentices successfully took their master to court. In the 1920s the EEF promoted a revised and attenuated model apprenticeship form among member firms in order to reduce employer liability to legal action by youths for inadequate training provision. See Ryan, “Apprenticeship and Industrial Relations in British Engineering.” p. 12–13.Google Scholar

16 Bridenbaugh, Carl, The Colonial Craftsman (Chicago, 1950), p. 130.Google Scholar

17 See Galenson, David, White Servitude in Colonial America (Cambridge, MA, 1981), pp. 127–48;Google ScholarNash, Gary B., “Artisans and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” in Quimby, Ian M. G., ed., The Craftsman in Early America (New York, 1984), pp. 62–88.Google Scholar

18 Morris, Richard B., Government and Labor in Early America (New York, 1965), pp. 444–70;Google ScholarQuimby, Ian M. G., Apprenticeship in Colonial Philadelphia (New York, 1985), p. 84.Google Scholar

19 See in particular, Rorabaugh, William, The Craft Apprentice (Oxford, 1986);Google ScholarWeyl, Walter E. and Sakolski, A. M., “Conditions of Entrance to the Principal Trades,” U.S. Bureau of Labor, Bulletin, No. 67 (Washington, D. C., 1906), pp. 755–56.Google Scholar

20 Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice, pp. 70, 139. Telephone conversation with William Rorabaugh, History Department, University of Washington.Google Scholar

21 Weyl and Sakolski, “Conditions of Entrance,” p. 758.Google Scholar

22 Becker, O. M., “Modern Adaptations of the Apprenticeship System,” Engineering Magazine, 32 (12. 1906), pp. 332–33.Google Scholar

23 National Association of Corporation Schools, Bulletin (also entitled Management Review), 1 (1914; reprint, New York, 1962), p. 20.Google Scholar

24 Lebergott, The Americans, p. 371.Google Scholar

25 Sundstrom, William, “Internal Labor Markets Before W.W.I,” Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming.Google Scholar

26 Stewart, Estelle M., “Apprenticeship in Building Construction,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bulletin, No. 459 (Washington, D. C., 1928), P. 9.Google Scholar