An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
—Benjamin Franklin
Melanie Johnson is changing careers. In her mid-thirties, a single mother of four in central Texas, she left her job at a manufacturer of automated mannequins (used in medical training) and went looking for stable, skilled work that’s in strong demand. Now her goal is to become a highly skilled laboratory animal technician, responsible for handling and caring for the animals used in medical research. She splits her time between the lab and the classroom, both supporting a family and working her way up.
Michael Baldwin blogs about life as a budding twenty-four-year-old electrician in the Washington D.C. metro area. To learn the ropes of the whole profession, he rotates around different job sites picking up a wide range of skills—most recently, he’s been learning how to replace fire alarm systems. The fire alarm crews are “more reserved” than the construction teams he was working with before, he says: “I do miss being surrounded by nothing but concrete and guys you might not find in an office building.” On a good day he’s “running pipe” with his “trusty pipe bending textbook”; on a bad day, he’s the newbie setting off a false alarm down the street, mixing up circuits and battling reverse polarities.
Beth Szillagi, tired of leafing through the classifieds every Sunday morning and working at a bank for “starvation wages,” became a sheet metal worker almost on impulse. One of three women surrounded by 200 men, Beth faced down active hostility from a macho union local and got herself “an education and a half.” “I’ve worked on everything from air handling units that push tons of air and will literally knock you off your feet, down to the smallest bathroom exhaust fan,” she tells Molly Martin in Hard Hatted Women, a powerful series of oral histories from “women in the trades.”
Melanie, Mike, and Beth: three snapshots of modern apprenticeship, a large-scale, humane model for training and beginning a career.1 Unlike interns, they work with healthcare, pension plans, and worker’s compensation behind them. Their paychecks are substantial enough to support a family, dwarfing those of all but the best-paid finance and engineering interns. Their training is structured and long-term, a combination of serious classroom time and learning on the job. Apprentices may be college graduates or prison inmates, single mothers or third-generation construction workers: unlike interns, they don’t have to pay their way in, struggle to survive, cut their teeth on photocopying and learn sheerly by osmosis.
“You want the people erecting the next nuclear power plant in this country to know what they’re doing,” says John Ladd, the federal administrator in charge of the Office of Apprenticeship (OA) at the Department of Labor. An apprenticeship, says Ladd, is “an integral transfer of knowledge,” traditionally used in “trades where you learn with your hands and learn by doing,” but there are no practical or theoretical limits to how the apprenticeship concept can be applied. To many people who’ve done apprenticeships or seen the apprentice system in action, he says, internships are “apprenticeship lite” by comparison, with “no consistency or standard”—brief in duration, often unstructured and barely supervised, precarious and unsustainable for interns and employers alike. Ladd likes to call apprenticeships “the gold standard in training” and “the other four-year degree” (as opposed to a Bachelor’s). “If you’re serious about having a skilled workforce,” he says, “you have to have a standard.”
The contrasts are stark—apprentices and interns seem to inhabit different universes. At this moment, there are nearly half a million active apprentices across the U.S. Nearly 200,000 people of all ages enter some 28,000 registered apprenticeship programs each year, learning a dizzying variety of over 1,000 skilled trades. Yet white-collar America imagines apprenticeships in medieval or Victorian caricature—blacksmiths and carpenters keeping young ruffians in line—and misses the modern picture entirely. Are internships white-collar apprenticeships? The answer is yes and no: on the one hand, internships are clearly presented in the same spirit, as a way to launch young people into their careers; on the other hand, internships fall far short of the modern apprenticeship model in nearly every respect, despite the wealth and sophistication of white-collar firms and industries. Dan Jacoby, a historian of apprenticeship, sees internships by comparison as “a chance to look at an environment rather than as a chance to learn the job.”
Here’s the typical scenario of how a modern apprenticeship comes into being: an individual employer, employer association, or labormanagement organization (in unionized industries) decides to take on apprentices, devises a training program, and registers it with a state or federal apprenticeship office, whose staff often lend their own expertise in setting up the program. Often, a community college or vocational school provides apprentices with the required minimum of 144 classroom hours each year, typically held in the evening—sometimes a dedicated training center fills this role. A contract between sponsor and apprentice lays out the obligations and expectations of each. Most programs are small-scale and highly personal; some have been around for decades. Although apprenticeships in construction trades usually comprise more than half the total number, the model has become important in fields as disparate as aerospace manufacturing, seafaring, cosmetology, and law enforcement, to name just a few. Major growth areas include green energy and social services such as childcare.
The motivations for setting up and maintaining such programs differ widely. In an Urban Institute survey of apprenticeship sponsors (mostly employers), harmony in the workplace, increased minority recruitment, and the desire to mentor young workers were all mentioned as reasons to support apprenticeships; one respondent added that the program “provides a living wage for a human being and an opportunity to pursue dreams.” More pragmatically, Ladd admits, an obvious benefit for employers is that they are able to pay apprentices “less than the prevailing wage.” Nonetheless, the average starting wage in these programs—across all regions and industries—is almost $13 an hour, an amount which rises rapidly with time and increased skill level.
From the perspective of labor unions (often, but not always, involved), the registered apprenticeship system represents an extension of hardwon benefits and humane working conditions down to the next generation of up-and-coming workers. Apprenticeships also enable unions to play an active role in recruiting and managing the local labor supply for a given industry. That’s why there aren’t too many unpaid sheet metal or ironworker internships, yet.
For apprentices themselves, what clinches the deal is the ability to “earn while you learn” and to enter stable, highly skilled trades that can support a solidly middle-class lifestyle. Program graduates earn an average of $45,000 per year and maintain benefits long lost to many white-collar workers. According to one study in Washington State involving thousands of former apprentices, “During the course of working life to age sixty-five, the average apprentice will gain about $229,800 in net earnings … and $41,200 in employee benefits” when compared with similar workers who never apprenticed.2 Lucky ex-interns may earn much more, of course, if they ultimately climb the corporate ladder with success—if.
Historians of apprenticeship pride themselves on the antiquity of their subject matter, trundling out the Code of Hammurabi, with its stern Babylonian injunction that master craftsmen pass on their trade. Some even assume or argue for the universal nature of apprenticeship, though this could only hold water in the broadest possible sense, as skills transfer varies greatly by culture and time period. For us, the quintessential image of the apprentice is a medieval one, with particular archetypes also stemming from Colonial America and Victorian England. The institution of apprenticeship grew out of the guild system of Gothic Europe—despite radical changes in socio-economic organization and the nature of work, the basic outlines of a continuous apprenticeship tradition endured down to the nineteenth century and arguably are still with us today.
In the intervening centuries, apprenticeship became a central metaphor and model for education more broadly. A widespread medieval term for guild was universitas, and some scholars assert that the first universities—early gatherings of scholars at Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and elsewhere—fancied themselves guilds of scholars, and that everything from set terms of student enrollment (inspired by indentures) to the concept of the dissertation (the “masterpiece” of a scholarly apprenticeship) drew on the model of guild apprenticeships. Apprenticeship as metaphor still seems modern and useful to most of us, but the actual practice is considered antiquated; we talk more of journeyman power forwards in the NBA than of journeyman craftsmen (who traveled to ply their trade, gathering funds to set up shop after completing their apprenticeship); the origins of the masterpiece (once the culmination of an apprentice’s labors) are largely forgotten.
The basic structure of English apprenticeship, an import from the European continent, is already discernible in the limited records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although the actual content of most apprentices’ training remains unknown. A typical term lasted seven years; the (mostly male) apprentices usually took up their indentures, with a nudge or a shove from their family, when they were around fourteen years old, the common-law “age of discretion.” These indentures spelled out mutual obligations, more or less formally—the apprentice would work for such and such a period, at tasks relevant to the craft (there were sometimes specific prohibitions against an apprentice performing grunt work considered the preserve of servants). In return the master was obligated to teach the apprentice his trade, while also providing housing, meals, clothing, and so on. Numerous other kinds of stipulations also commonly bound both parties—that the apprentice should not marry during his term, for instance, or that the master should provide bedding or clothing of a certain quality.
It is striking that so much of our evidence for apprenticeships, in every period, is gleaned from legal records. By contrast, the meteoric half-century rise of internships has left barely a trace in official records. A possible explanation is that apprenticeships emerged and flourished in a mercantilist world and were cemented with contracts, both written and unwritten, between master and apprentice (or sometimes the apprentice’s parents). Another impetus came from the guilds, which struggled both to ensure quality outcomes and to avoid a glut of entrants into their professions. Indeed, the main purpose of these early regulations was often to control the number of apprentices a master could take on at any given time (usually one or two). Other legal provisions focused on runaway apprentices, the bane of masters from the very beginning and still a challenge for modern programs—the considerable length of apprenticeship terms means that completion rates have often hovered around 50 percent, historically and down to the present day. For many medieval apprentices, the most compelling reason to stick around was “the freedom of the city” gained upon completing one’s indentures—a kind of urban citizenship that ensured entry to a professional guild, the ability to set up shop and trade freely, and the right to participate in local politics and to take on apprentices oneself.
In England, the local statutes emerged gradually from guild regulations, and apprenticeship became somewhat more uniform across professions, although geographic variation remained considerable. A signal moment came in 1563, with the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers. This law “codified and systematized at the national level preexisting customary and statutory practices,” fixing the character of apprenticeship until 1814, when the statute was finally repealed. Seven years or more was now fixed as the standard term of indenture, ending at age twenty-four or older. The sheer profusion of apprenticeship opportunities in midseventeenth-century London is worth remembering too. The very names of these trades peel back the surface of a vanished world: linendraper, mercer, merchant-tailor, silkman, woollendraper, salter, hosier, skinner, silkthrower, trunkmaker, buttonseller, hotpresser, girdler, sempster—all had apprentices.
Equally exotic now is the nature of master-apprentice ties, to which modern society has no real equivalent. (Of course, in certain cases the master actually was a relation of the apprentice, sometimes even his father, or else a friend of the apprentice’s family.) From the records of Bristol apprenticeships in the early seventeenth century, historian Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos concludes that these involved “young men probably able to rely on some parental help to establish themselves,” largely the offspring of a nascent middle class of yeoman and other craftsmen. As a result, “apprentices expected to live to the same degree of comfort as their new household,” writes historian Bernard Elbaum. Historian Margaret Pelling has described in detail, for early modern London, the degree to which masters were held responsible for the health and wellbeing of their apprentices—and might be accountable to both law and custom if anything went wrong. Pelling traced the decline of this strong in loco parentis tradition over time, as capitalist market relations set in and masters decided that it was easier to pay a wage and let apprentices manage their own expenses.3
Enforcement and monitoring of the system was entrusted to the guilds, though apprenticeships ran substantially on trust. In small towns and in the countryside, wrote Adam Smith a few decades before the statute’s repeal, the Statute of Artificers was little heeded anyway, given the desperate demand for skilled labor, from whatever source. Over time, the range of professions covered by the Statute remained of a basically Elizabethan cast—newer craftsmen (watchmakers, for instance) embraced neither guilds nor the apprenticeship system to the same degree. As some of the older professions fell from favor or relevance, the Statute’s influence receded.
By the eighteenth century, broader economic changes opened apprenticeship up to criticism. Most famously, Smith roundly abused the English system established under the Statute of Artificers, pillorying it in The Wealth of Nations as “a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty, both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him.” Payment in lodging, meals, and so forth, rather than cash, Smith averred, disposed the apprentice to slothfulness, since “the sweets of labour consist altogether in the recompence of labour.” He criticized apprenticeships as restraining trade and holding back competition in the natural division of labor, given the continuing caps on the number of apprentices most masters could take on. In Scotland, he noted, the typical term of indenture was a much milder three years in length, and in France usually five years (though five more as a journeyman followed). (Smith overlooked the fact that masters made back their investment on early training by keeping apprentices longer.)
Another common charge in early modern Europe was that apprentices made up a motley society of their own, a rough lot known for stirring up considerable mischief and social unrest. Poor conditions and abusive masters fed hooliganism, adolescence avant la lettre, and frustrated acts of rebellion. Robert Darnton resurrects this forgotten milieu in The Great Cat Massacre, drawing on Nicolas Contat’s detailed account of his own apprenticeship in an eighteenth-century Paris printing shop.4 “Life as an apprentice was hard,” writes Darnton. “They slept in a filthy, freezing room, rose before dawn, ran errands all day while dodging insults from the journeyman and abuse from the master, and received nothing but slops to eat. They found the food especially galling. Instead of dining at the master’s table, they had to eat scraps from his plate in the kitchen. Worse still, the cook secretly sold the leftovers and gave the boys cat food—old, rotten bits of meat that they could not stomach and so passed on to the cats, who refused it.” Relatively well off and self-important, the master neither worked with nor ate alongside the apprentices; this was the foreman’s job. Worst of all, the apprentices foresaw little opportunity to become masters themselves one day: by this time, the number of printers in Paris was fixed by law, and the privilege tended to pass through families.
Under these circumstances, the apprentices staged a small but significant subversion, an act of what Darnton calls “ritual punning.” The boys were menaced by “a profusion of alley cats who also thrived in the printing district and made [their] lives miserable.” For several nights one week, they decided to imitate the horrible howling and meowing of the cats outside the master’s bedroom. Driven to madness by the boys’ pitchperfect imitation, the master and his wife commanded the apprentices to purge the alley cats, which they did with delighted abandon, bludgeoning and smashing the poor animals with bars of the press, broom handles, and other printing equipment; afterwards, they “dumped sackloads of half-dead cats in the courtyard,” staged a mock trial declaring the animals guilty, and hanged the cats on the gallows, all the while laughing wildly and uncontrollably, to the horror of master and mistress.
The modern reader, finding this vignette “unfunny, if not downright repulsive,” thus discovers “the distance that separates us from the workers of preindustrial Europe,” as Darnton wrote. The cat massacre is a window onto a world of dead-end apprenticeship—will future historians find similar accounts of tongue-in-cheek intern rebellion? The Guardian recently reported on an intern at the London fashion magazine Grazia whose symbolic practical joke may one day seem just as opaque. Regularly dispatched to buy skinny lattes for the beauty desk, the intern announced on her last day that she had been buying the staff full-fat lattes all along—distant but unmistakable echoes of a modest sedition.5
“Printer’s devils,” as printing apprentices were called, could be among the most troublesome, particularly with their ability to read and write. It was in fact a “bookish inclination” that “determined my father to make me a printer,” writes Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography. “I stood out some time, but at last was persuaded, and signed the indentures when I was yet but twelve years old. I was to serve as an apprentice till I was twenty-one years of age, only I was to be allowed journeyman’s wages during the last year.”6 The master was none other than Ben’s older brother James, who reprimanded and beat the young apprentice in spite of fraternal ties. Although Ben learned his trade well, and would later take on apprentices himself in his Philadelphia printing shop, he broke his indentures and skipped town, seizing the chance to stow away on a ship in Boston Harbor. “In three days I found myself in New York, near 300 miles from home,” writes Franklin, “a boy of but 17, without the least recommendation to, or knowledge of, any person in the place, and very little money in my pocket.” He did, however, know how to work a printing press.
Franklin’s flight was emblematic of the rough start faced by apprenticeship in the New World. Without professional guilds (which never took hold in North America), the master-apprentice relationship often became a one-on-one struggle, with the apprentice always poised to take flight across state lines or to an expanding frontier where new opportunities beckoned. Though it never became “entrenched” as it was in Europe, writes Gillian Hamilton, apprenticeship was nonetheless the “principal means of acquiring skill in the colonial era.” By and large, it followed the English model set out in the Statute of Artificers, as far as age and indentures went. The American heyday of traditional apprenticeship was the mid-to-late-eighteenth century; even today, the Office of Apprenticeship likes to remind Americans that nearly all the founding fathers started out as apprentices.
Yet it was the American Revolution, made by these ex-apprentices, which ironically spelled the institution’s decline. Wars were always a notoriously difficult time to hold onto apprentices, many of whom would change their indentures for army service on a moment’s notice. There is evidence that the American Revolution in particular broadened the discourse of freedom in a way that threw indentures into a bad light. From 1783 to 1799, twelve states passed apprenticeship laws that aimed at solving the runaway problem—apparently to little avail (along with Franklin, Andrew Johnson, Kit Carson, and George Westinghouse, Jr. were other famous runaway apprentices). The dawn of the industrial revolution and westward expansion across the continent added substantially to the problem. Hamilton sees rapid population growth as the larger catalyst, bringing with it “improved local market opportunities and a decline in neighborly familiarity” that mortally wounded the institution of internships.
Between 1800 and 1860 in a single Maryland county, William Rorabaugh discovered, the percentage of white males in formal apprenticeships fell from nearly 20 percent of the population to under 1 percent.7 In Montreal, where apprenticeship records are unusually complete, Hamilton found that decline set in around 1815, due at first to “difficulties in contract enforcement”—the age-old problem of apprentices leaving their indentures early with impunity. It was rarely worth the cost or the trouble for a master to chase down an apprentice who had run off. The rise of larger workshops and firms, more likely to hire women and children for less skilled work, also put a dent in the apprenticeship market in nineteenth-century Montreal. Another telling change emerges from the Montreal records: the percentage of apprentices receiving cash wages climbed from 35 percent in the 1790s to 82 percent by the 1830s, while payment in kind (housing, clothing, etc.) plunged.
The revival and modernization of American apprenticeship would not come for another century, and the rise of compulsory public education in the meantime would impose powerful constraints. In Europe and the British Commonwealth, apprenticeship persisted much more strongly through the nineteenth century, setting the stage for its broader use down to the present day. In the British case, “customs, inherited from the guilds, that favored training certification for entry into skilled jobs” played a major role, writes Elbaum; in Germany, “government legislation has been integral to the apprenticeship system.” Twenty years ago, Elbaum found that apprenticeships accounted for only 0.3 percent of civilian employment in the U.S., as opposed to 2–3 percent in Commonwealth countries, and 5–6 percent in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—in the last-mentioned countries, he wrote, apprenticeship remains “the principal means of training for skilled manual trades” and a serious alternative to college. In 2009, a German study found that 40 percent of young people who had the opportunity to attend college free of charge nonetheless chose instead to enter apprenticeships instead.
In the U.S., the system continued to wither away—while Dickens’ Pip in Great Expectations served as a blacksmith apprentice, Horatio Alger praised the upward mobility of newsboys, peddlers, and young shoeshiners in New York; Andrew Carnegie was getting his start as a telegraph messenger boy in Pittsburgh; and the largest cohort of all was heading west. The apprenticeships that survived were “far closer to an arm’slength market transaction,” in which “apprentices generally lived at home and were paid money wages,” writes Elbaum. If the wages were relatively low, barring entrance to many lower-class hopefuls, an apprenticeship nonetheless “promised earnings far superior to those of alternative workingclass jobs” over the span of a career. A nail in the coffin came with the spread of schooling—“increasingly sought as the vehicle for upward social mobility,” as Jacoby writes. The rise of schooling placed “the expense of and the responsibility for training upon the learner,” achieved significant economies of scale, and helped companies and employer associations to keep control of the labor supply away from ever more powerful unions.8
American apprenticeship was an institution on the margins by the time social psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term “adolescence” in 1898. For Hall, this transitional phase of life could begin as early as age twelve and still apply even to the occasional twenty-five-year-old. High school, a world unto itself, became the new crucible of youth culture, making the antics of printers’ devils and runaway apprentices a distant memory. Hall’s concept of the adolescent had come into wide circulation by the 1930s and 1940s, writes Grace Palladino in Teenagers: An American History, as modern youth culture became a full-fledged reality. It was a momentous change: “When a teenage majority spent the better of their day in high school,” writes Palladino, “they learned to look to one another and not to adults for advice, information, and approval.”
Youth labor, if it was encouraged at all, became primarily a summertime activity, except school-year jobs taken “on the side.” At the end of the nineteenth century, as the mania for fresh air and leisure time took hold, reformers challenged year-round education and labor, advocating a dose of recreation for young people. In the same period, summer camps, deliberate communities dedicated to outdoor activity and education, were “transformed from experimental institutions to mainstays of mass culture,” as Leslie Paris describes in Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. As Paris writes, “summer camps have provided many American children’s first experience of community beyond their immediate family and home neighborhoods … children found the experience of attending camp revelatory and formative.” Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts were only one of a raft of new youth movements emphasizing group activities and the outdoors—laboring, implicitly, was seen as less formative. Older teens and college students, gingerly entering the working world of adulthood, earned money and forged a work ethic by gravitating to light summer jobs: scooping ice cream, working as camp counselors, lifeguarding, waiting tables, helping out with the family business.
The demise of traditional apprenticeship and the triumph of schooling had this unintended effect. The classic American summer, which internships are now finally eroding, became an escape valve, a time and space comparatively beyond the reach of authority and given over to spontaneous, sentimental, and practical education. Although never available or even desirable for all, those summers have been a space to grow in: barbecues and stickball in the streets, family visits and camping trips, romantic flings and assorted mischief. For many teens and college kids, those twoto three-month breaks represented a first shot at freedom and selfdetermination.
Off an anonymous white hallway—lined with quiet, orderly offices, with names like “Employees’ Compensation Appeal Board” and “Division of Trade Adjustment Assistance”—John Ladd sits beneath a large framed copy of the 1937 Fitzgerald Act, the 200-plus words that finally stabilized and revived apprenticeship in the United States. Buried inside the concrete modernist honeycomb of the Department of Labor, just a stone’s throw from Capitol Hill, Ladd quietly and persistently makes his case for keeping a medieval institution alive in the twenty-first century.
Unassuming, unsmiling, Ladd speaks pragmatically and to the point—in a broad Boston accent and without a whiff of politics, surrounded in his office by obscure bureaucratic trophies for competence and efficiency. To oversee nearly a half million apprenticeships, Ladd has a staff of only twenty in Washington D.C. and a further 125 people “in the field,” largely in the twenty-five states without apprenticeship programs of their own. With employers and community colleges bearing many of the costs of apprentice training, the Office of Apprenticeship (OA) runs on a miniscule annual budget of some $20 million, making it about as small and unobtrusive as a federal program can be. “Compared to the systems in some other countries,” write the authors of the Urban Institute report on the future of apprenticeship, “the apprenticeship system in the U.S. is far more decentralized and relies more on employers’ decisions.”
The Fitzgerald Act empowered the Department of Labor “to promote the furtherance of labor standards necessary to safeguard the welfare of apprentices and to cooperate with the States in the promotion of such standards.” That is to say—if modern apprentices like Melanie, Mike, and Beth are paid fair wages and enjoy good working conditions, they have in large part the Fitzgerald Act and the OA to thank. If American apprenticeship today is a humane, rational system—with statistics and goals like any other public policy initiative, provisions for racial and gender diversity, and a steady supply of skilled labor coming out the other end—the credit is due not only to unions and decent employers, but also to Ladd’s office.
Registering an apprenticeship program with the OA and meeting its detailed standards is voluntary—Ladd is in every way a promoter, hardly at all an enforcer. Registration creates “a portable national credential” for skilled workers, says Ladd, “akin to accreditation,” setting certain standards around fair application procedures, supervision, classroom instruction (144 hours annually), on-the-job training (2,000 hours), wage increases, anti-discrimination policies, and so on. From a public policy perspective, a central aim of apprenticeship is to ensure a continuing supply of highly skilled labor to power the American economy. The higher taxes paid by well-compensated graduates of apprentice programs more than make up for the small investments made by federal and state governments. Unregistered apprenticeships, however, exist in much the same liminal space as internships, numbering in the hundreds of thousands and operating well beyond Ladd’s purview. Less likely to be comprehensive, life-changing experiences, they at least tend to be decently paid, influenced by the strong gravitational pull of OA’s national standards.
As so often in the U.S., federal legislation was the culmination of decades of activism and law-making at local levels. Union-backed state legislation and local industry-specific programs powered the rebirth of apprenticeship. In 1911, Wisconsin (then a nexus of progressive policymaking) made the first attempt to organize apprenticeship at the state level, putting it under the supervision of an industrial commission and mandating an educational component. With guarantees of fair pay and decent treatment, young people flocked back to apprenticeship and employers snapped them up: in Wisconsin, the number of recorded apprenticeships grew from five in 1912 to 821 in 1925. During this period, the number of apprentices nationwide grew steadily with the overall size of the workforce, from approximately 44,000 in 1880 to 140,000 in 1920. The new apprentices were likely to be older as well, having completed some schooling. Fears of a skilled labor shortage crystallized during World War I, fueling the rise of cooperative education (see Chapter 5), the growth of vocational programs under the Smith-Hughes Act, and finally the creation of national apprenticeship standards.
The early twentieth-century revival of apprenticeship has been enduring; the Fitzgerald Act has weathered seven decades. In a recent study, 86 percent of apprentices expressed satisfaction with their classroom training, 84 percent with their on-the-job training. One large-scale survey of nearly a thousand apprenticeship sponsors found that 97 percent would recommend the program to others, and 86 percent would “strongly” recommend it. An overwhelming majority of these employers cited apprenticeships as helping them meet the demand for skilled workers, raising overall productivity, improving safety, and strengthening worker morale. The “poaching” of apprentices by other firms—a theoretical worry of economists since Gary Becker, who thus counsel against providing general training—does not emerge as a major concern in reality.
Recently, in Oakland, California, I attended a town hall meeting about proposed reforms to update the Fitzgerald Act for the twenty-first century. The youngest person in the room, I was surrounded by an audience of passionate apprenticeship supporters, mostly men in jeans and black leather jackets, many sporting the insignia of unions or apprenticeship programs. Sitting in the sun-filled conference room, I was half nodding off through the opening Powerpoint presentation until the floor was opened to comments and questions, and the floodgates burst open. Why is apprenticeship looked down on, despite all its benefits? everyone wondered aloud. Why are there still so few women and minorities in skilled labor trades, beginning with the apprenticeship years? They argued and wrung their hands, but I was fascinated—watching an open, spirited debate, aimed at realistic reforms, such as the world of internships has never produced.
Apprenticeship has been “the best-kept secret” for too long, said Don Davis, an electrician who mentors apprentices in Los Angeles—“we need to educate this country that it is a very viable means to an education and a very viable means to a career.” Davis bemoaned “the lack of respect and the loss of interest” in skilled labor, such that people are “ashamed to be called an apprentice”; Jamie Robinson, a former carpentry apprentice, described the disdainful “physical reaction” when telling friends and family that she had chosen an apprenticeship over college. “The audience isn’t there, the attention isn’t there,” averred John Bullock, a union carpenter for four decades and a member of the Carpenters Training Committee for Northern California during half of that time. “Nobody knows about it. You don’t have to pay to go to school!”
A range of ideas and critiques were floated, while an OA administrator listened attentively and a court reporter tapped each word into the record. “Invest time and effort in the high schools,” counseled an ironworker from San Francisco who coordinates an apprenticeship program. End the nepotism in the trades and the reign of “FBI ‘families, buddies, and inlaws,’ ” which begins at the apprentice level, added an African American journeyman mechanic. Solve child-care issues for single-mother apprentices, said women apprentices—while still others responded with examples of programs that have made their own daycare arrangements. Imagine an internship where daycare is provided!
The analogy between internships and apprenticeships is thin enough until you consider modern apprenticeship—then it vanishes almost entirely. A better comparison in the historical record might be with someone like William Cheselden, “the well-known lithotomist, with Newton and Pope among his patients,” who, according to historian Joan Lane, received 150 [pounds], 210 and 350 as premiums in the years 1712–30 for taking on apprentices.9 Wealthy parents were often willing to pay to place their offspring in such exceptional, prestigious apprenticeships—but with internships, the practice has now reached an unprecedented scale. On the whole, modern apprenticeship in the West is the justified successor to the European tradition of craft apprenticeship, minus the cruelty, coercion, and familial arrangements and sensibly updated for the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. Long after guilds have vanished, the endurance and adaptability of “learning by doing,” in small settings and over significant lengths of time, is worth pondering. Will there still be internships eight centuries hence, in some form or other?
Without question, apprenticeships have been stymied in the whitecollar world, pre-empted by the short-term, unpaid, employer-dominated internship model. The history of internships suggests an explanation: no one has been watching. Internship boosters have invoked apprenticeships without studying their history or evolution. In cubicles and offices, but not construction sites, the battle to protect young people on the job and to balance working and learning remains much as it was in the nineteenth century, or the thirteenth. Internships have grown up in a permissive period, ill disposed to regulation and blind to labor issues.
Jacoby offers a more sanguine view: “Apprenticeship works better in a stable technology environment, so if the skills are constantly shifting or if the jobs aren’t going to be there, then the willingness to make an investment in those skills and jobs is going much more difficult.” This is one of the strongest justifications for internships—that their very pliability is suited to a fast-changing, intangible economy built on networks and highly general skills. Nonetheless, says Jacoby of internships, “We don’t really grapple with what you have to master to move to the next level effectively … They create the sense of an open architecture where people feel like they can move into fields where they don’t have a lot of background … but I think that’s going to be more sleight-of-hand than reality.” Through high school and college, everything is made to seem possible, and internships extend the fantasy, until it comes time to land a stable, comfortable, decently paid job.