John Potter. The Attempt to Restore Legal Enforcement of Apprenticeship in Massachusetts in 1865. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association. October, 1997.
Summary
In 1865, in the wake of a bitter strike by printers in Boston, and under pressure from organized labor, the Massachusetts legislature formed a special joint committee to consider labor issues. Although the story of this committee is well-known, with David Montgomery’s Beyond Equality providing the best known account, there is an important point about the committee that have been overlooked. While the committee is generally known to historians for its pioneering report in favor of legislation to establish the eight hour day and, in retrospect, this was what the committee’s members later concentrated all of their attention on, its actual name was the Joint Special Committee on Questions of Apprenticeship and the Hours of Labor. Moreover, this name, and the order in which the issues appeared, more generally reflect the importance that the committee members placed upon the issue of restoring apprenticeship at the time.
It is clear from a study of the reports of the Committee hearings, and of the results of the committee’s work that, at the time, they considered a restoration of the apprenticeship laws and the control of the number of workers entering the skilled trades to be the priority for labor. The vast majority of the hearings of the committee were devoted to discussion of the need to restore apprenticeship laws so as to prevent competion from both foreign immigrants and, to a lesser extent, women (who had been important in breaking the recent strike by printers). Also, the head of the Committee, Edward Rogers, left the drafting of the report on proposed eight-hours legislation to another, Senator Martin Griffin, while personally introducing the proposed legislation on apprenticeship. Finally, it is significant, that while the committee only issued a report in favor of eight hour legislation, it actually introduced a bill in the House to reestablish the apprenticeship system. Unfortunately, for its proponents, the bill suffered crippling amendments and Rogers eventually felt compelled to withdraw it.
Historians can be forgiven for ignoring the committee’s attention to apprenticeship, because within a few years even the members of the committee itself were ignoring it. By that time, the eight-hour question had become the main goal of the labor movement and it would continue to be so for many years. At the same time, apprenticeship came to be considered an anachronism. As a result, even the members of the committee itself came to refer to it as the committee on the hours of labor. Moreover, even in 1865, workers testifying at the hearings showed themselves to be divided over the question of whether apprenticeship was needed or whether it would be an effective method of controlling competition. Finally, the legislature was greatly concerned with the question of whether proposed apprenticeship fees would close off careers to the poor. Eventually, it was an amendment to allow poor parents to pay reduced apprenticeship fees that led to Roger’s withdrawal of the proposed bill.