Social exclusion and modern apprenticeships

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Social exclusion and modern apprenticeships: a comparison of britain and the USA Roger Penn

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EXCLUSION Journal of Vocational Education andSOCIAL Training, Vol. 50,AND No. MODERN 2, 1998 APPRENTICESHIPS

Social Exclusion and Modern Apprenticeships: a comparison of Britain and the USA


ROGER PENN Lancaster University, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT ‘Modern’ apprenticeships have been in place in Britain since 1994. However, the social characteristics of 'modern' apprentices appear remarkably similar to those of traditional apprentices: 89% of the first wave of modern apprentices were male; and only 3% from ethnic minorities. As will be shown subsequently, such exclusivity is deep-set within the British apprenticeship system. It is interesting to note that most previous analyses of modern apprenticeships have described this situation in a variety of ways but failed to grasp its significance. The lack of commitment by the Conservative Government, headed by John Major, to issues of social exclusion has been well documented. This is seen clearly in the Department of Education and Employment's report into the early stages of modern apprenticeships. Their discussion of social exclusion and modern apprenticeships is perfunctory and their recommendations merely boil down to exhortations to various institutions to increase the proportion of apprenticeships from ethnic minority backgrounds and who are female. In this they reproduce the timidity of the Commission for Racial Equality. The main purpose of this article is to situate the continuation of patterns of ethnic and gender exclusivity in British apprenticeships within a broad historical and comparative perspective. It will be shown that ethnic and gender exclusion is central to apprenticeship structures historically in both Britain and America. Further, it will be shown that these structures are breaking down to a considerable degree in the United States, more for women than for ethnic minorities, and that the catalysts and institutional changes that have helped precipitate these developments in the United States hold important lessons for contemporary Britain.

The Traditional Pattern of Skilled Work in Britain and America Skilled workers in both Britain and America have been traditionally white and male. In Britain, the craft unions of the later nineteenth century excluded women explicitly from membership (Walby, 1986). The Amalgamated Society of Engineers did not permit women's membership of the union until 1943 and they strongly opposed the presence of women in craft areas of metalworking during the First World War (Cole, 1923; Penn, 259


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1985). Skilled work was also ethnically homogeneous. In the context of the second half of the nineteenth century, this mainly meant the exclusion of Irish and Jewish immigrants. Skilled work in the Glasgow and Belfast shipyards and in the Liverpool docks were reserved for white Protestant workers. These ethnic and religious divisions around the axis of skill were powerful factors in the internal stratification of the British working class at this time (Penn, 1985). In many areas of skilled work, the trade unions, or more precisely the trade unionists, had a powerful voice in the selection of apprentices. In the cotton industry, the loom overlookers (maintenance and supervisory workers in the weaving sheds) voted on the desirability of potential recruits for apprenticeships in a manner identical to the 'black-balling' used by exclusive patrician organisations like London clubs. In printing, the compositors had the effective right of veto over applicants for apprenticeships, and there has been a long-standing tradition of 'speaking for' young lads by older skilled workers.

Skilled workers in the USA have also traditionally been white and male. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the skilled trades were overwhelmingly male (Penn, 1990). Rapid American industrialisation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century coincided with massive immigration into the USA, and there was a powerful tendency to restrict skilled work to either native white Americans or to Northern and Western European immigrants (ibid). There are various reasons for this discriminatory pattern. Skilled work was highly prized within the American working class, particularly that involving apprenticeships. Such jobs involved relatively high pay (Gustman & Segal, 1974; Orton, 1976) and status (NORC, 1947; Penn, 1975) and significant degrees of job autonomy (Montgomery, 1976; Dawson, 1979). As Taft (1964) has shown, few white working-class families could afford the expense of higher education for their children at this time and this led to a strong desire by skilled workers to restrict entry into the skilled trades to their sons or close male relatives. Such strategies of exclusion were reinforced by negative gender and ethnic cultural stereotyping. Non-whites and women in particular were seen as unsuitable for skilled work. The cultural mix surrounding apprenticeships tended to rule women and non-whites out of serious consideration. The close social and physical proximity of craft worker and apprentice predisposed craftsmen to seek boys for such learning periods. This was reinforced by racist stereotypes of non-whites as 'idle, shiftless and unreliable' and of women as only marginally committed to full-time

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paid employment and of being incapable of understanding the complexities of skilled work. Such discriminatory expectations have been powerful traditionally in American industry. Even in those industries like automobiles and steel where the unions did not get involved in the selection of apprentices, there were strong factors disposing management to select young white males. A major factor was the willingness or otherwise of skilled workers to countenance women or non-whites as apprentices. As Taft notes, "the members rather than the leaders, as was shown at the 1963 Convention of the Brotherhood of Firemen and Enginemen and in many others in the past, are the most guilty of discrimination and anxious to continue such a policy" (1964, p.681). Indeed there has been a long history of ethnic discrimination amongst US trade unions. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Knights of Labor attempted to recruit black members and to overcome the previous traditions of ethnic exclusion. However, with the demise of the Knights of Labor, it was left to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to attempt to remove ethnic discrimination amongst its constituent unions. Samuel Gompers, leader of the AFL, found this easier said than done, particularly in the area of informal union practices and rites. For example, the International Association of Machinists dropped its formal prohibition of black members in 1895 in order to gain its AFL charter. Nevertheless, it continued to exclude blacks from its initiation ceremonies until 1948. The racial animosity of white union members was exacerbated by the occasional use of black strike-breakers. This reinforced the negative stereotypes that white trade unionists held of non-whites in American society. In both Britain and the USA the strong involvement of craft workers in the day-today operation of the apprenticeship system facilitated considerable pressure from the skilled workforce as to the characteristics of apprentice intakes. Often boys were 'spoken for' by their fathers and uncles. It was particularly this policy of restricting apprenticeships to the sons or male relatives of existing workers that maintained the maleness of such jobs and, given their ethnic homogeneity, prevented the entry of recruits from a wider range of ethnic backgrounds. These traditions produced expectations amongst craftsmen as to what an apprentice would look like - young, male and white - and also

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influenced managerial images about the boundaries between 'male' and 'female' and 'white' and 'black' work. Since 1945, the central axis of ethnic exclusion in Britain has been between whites and non-whites. The latter comprise people whose origins are generally either West Indian or from India and Pakistan. The contours of ethnic exclusion from apprenticeships in Britain have been analysed in detail by Wrench & Lee in Birmingham (1981a,b). Their research catalogued a variety or practices that were discriminatory in their effects. Many firms preferred to recruit locally which had the effect of excluding non-whites, who were concentrated residentially in the decaying inner areas of the city, from obtaining apprenticeships in the predominantly white suburbs. Wrench & Lee also emphasised the significance of family connections: Some firms have a clear policy of recruiting disproportionately from the kin of existing employees. More common is the statement ' if two lads apply and they are absolutely equal we will take the employee's son' ... The problem is that craft areas are predominantly white, and thus will remain so as long as the relatives of white craft employees get preference. (Wrench & Lee, 1981a, p. 517) These practices, which have come to be labelled the 'lads of dads syndrome', were exacerbated by the effects of mass unemployment in Birmingham - long the heartland of the West Midlands metals and engineering industrial complex. Fewer firms advertised apprenticeship vacancies - rather they relied on informal networks based upon their existing skilled workforces. The craft unions supported these practices. One shop steward in Birmingham stated that 'as trade unionists we insist that the employees' families get preferential treatment. We say academic criteria are not the main thing' (Wrench & Lee, 1981b, p. 8).

Indeed, there is a powerful evidence that in many British firms, craft work has been restricted deliberately to white workers as the result of pressure from the existing craft workforces. An infamous example of this occurred at the Castle Bromwich plant of BL Cars Ltd in Birmingham. It was alleged that in 1977 two shop stewards (both representing members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers) successfully forced a supervisor to reject a black recruit into the toolroom. Eventually, this was admitted, as was the existence of a resolution passed by toolfitters not to accept non-white recruits. The firm argued before an Industrial Tribunal that they were not guilty of discrimination, rather their workforce was! In the words of the company solicitor, ' the reason for not appointing him was not because 262



he was black but because others would not work with him because he was black' (CRE, no date). This specious argument was rejected by the Commission for Racial Equality, since on such reasoning an employer could decide not to appoint a black foreman because his employees would refuse to obey him; or a housing authority could decide not to allocate an apartment to a non-white family because the neighbours would object. There is overwhelming evidence from both America and Britain that skilled workers have been traditionally white and male. The exclusion of non-whites and women have been the result of an inter-connection of a variety of mechanisms which include employers, trade unions and skilled workers themselves. From a wider sociological point of view this is part of the wider self-stratification of the working class around the axis of skill (Penn, 1985; Form, 1976, 1985). However, these patterns have changed significantly in the United States since the 1960s, but have remained impermeable in Britain. A major factor in these changes has been the weakening of exclusivity within the apprenticeship system in the United States. This has to be contrasted with the almost complete failure to address these issues successfully in Britain. Apprenticeship and Gender in the United States It is clear from Table I that the proportion of females within the ranks of the major skilled manual occupations in the USA has generally increased significantly since 1970. The percentage of female carpenters and tool and die makers almost doubled whilst the proportion of sheetmetal workers trebled. There was a dramatic increase in the proportion of female telephone installers and repairers and telephone line installers which resulted directly from the pressure put upon AT&T after 1970 by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (Hacker, 1979, 1989). There was also the emergence of a cadre of skilled coal mining machine operators, although this occurred mainly in the 1970s and tailed off during the 1980s. It is also worth noting the dramatic feminization of typesetting and computing work within the printing industry. This has occurred in parallel to a significant degree of deskilling (see Penn, 1990, for an extensive discussion of technical change and skill within the British and American printing industries).

When Table II is examined, it becomes evident that there were a higher percentage of female apprentices amongst all the skilled occupations for which there are data by 1990: automobile mechanics; 263


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carpenters; electricians; plumbers; machinists; and sheetmetal workers. This signifies that a growing proportion of such skilled trades will become female over time as a result of demographic factors since apprentices are by definition relatively young. The extent of the change in the gender composition of apprenticeships in the United States between 1960 and 1990 is summarised in Table III. Overall, it is clear that the traditional pattern whereby apprentices were almost exclusively male has changed significantly in the United States. Since 1960 it is also clear that skilled manual occupations which do not require apprenticeships in the classical sense, such as telephone line installers, and telephone installers have become even less overwhelmingly male. Gender and Skilled Trades in Britain It is apparent from Table IV that most skilled trades in Britain in 1991 remained almost exclusively male. There were a significant number of female welders, most of whom were semi-skilled welding machine operators (see Penn, 1990, for a discussion of welding as a skilled occupation). There was also a significant number of female compositors which paralleled the feminisation of composing work in printing in the United States as a result of widespread deskilling that was evident in the previous section. Nonetheless, the relative strength of the British print unions is revealed in the fact that only a third of British compositors were women in 1991 compared to 70% in the United States (Table II).

42mm

Table I. Males and females in selected skilled occupations in the USA, 1970–1990.

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98mm

Table II. Males and females in skilled trades and apprenticeships in the USA, 1990.

Unlike the United States, there had been little change in these patterns since 1951 (Table V). There was some evidence of an increase in the proportion of painters and decorators, toolmakers and motor mechanics between 1981 and 1991 but these were offset by decreases amongst carpenters, sheetmetal workers, welders and precision instrument-makers.

46mm

Table III. Apprenticeship and gender in the USA, 1960 and 1990.

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76mm

Table IV. Gender and skilled trades in Great Britain, 1991.

48mm

Table V. Percentage of women in selected crafts in Britain, 1951–1991. White Black Caribbean Indian Pakistani Bangadeshi Skilled Construction: Male Female

99.4 100

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

Skilled Engineering: Male Female

98.1 100

0 0

0 0

1.9 0

0 0

Table VI. Percentage of skilled workers aged 16 and 17 years by ethnicity and gender in Britain in 1991. Source: 1991 Census of Population.

It is also evident that neither the construction nor engineering industries, the main traditional areas for apprenticeships historically (Liepman, 1958; Williams, 1958), had opened up their apprenticed ranks to either young women or to young people from ethnic minority backgrounds (Table VI). It 266


is worth pointing out that only 92.9% of males and females aged 16 and 17 were white.


Apprenticeship and Race in the United States Table VII reveals that the proportion of Blacks and Hispanics amongst a series of important skilled manual occupations had also increased in the United States between 1970 and 1990. The proportion of electricians, telephone installers and line installers, tool and die makers and sheetmetal workers from these two large ethnic minority groups had approximately doubled over the twenty year period. On the other hand, the proportion of typesetters and compositors from Black and Hispanic backgrounds had fallen. This suggests that whilst these occupations had almost certainly been subject to pervasive deskilling since the 1960s, the main social effect was to feminise the work, but almost exclusively for white rather than ethnic minority women. This development certainly warrants further research since no current sociological theory can satisfactorily explain such a pattern of differential change.

40mm

Table VII. Percentages of Blacks and Hispanics in selected skilled occupations in the USA, 1970–1990.

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Table VIII. USA, 1990.

There is also a complex picture in relation to the ethnic characteristics of apprentices. Table VIII indicates that Hispanics were a lower proportion of apprentices than of a range of skilled trades. These include automobile mechanics, electricians, plumbers, tool and die makers, and machinists. Only amongst sheetmetal workers and carpenters was there a higher proportion of Hispanic apprentices than craftworkers. A parallel, if somewhat different pattern was evident 268


amongst Blacks. There was a smaller proportion of Black plumber, tool and die maker and machinist apprentices when compared to the proportion of skilled workers. However, there was a higher proportion of apprenticed carpenters, electricians and automobile workers. When Table IX is examined it is evident that the proportion of non-white apprentices was lower than the overall population proportion in almost all cases. However, amongst automobile mechanics and carpenters the proportions were close to what would have been expected given an equal likelihood of allocation across all ethnic groups.


White Black Hispanic Automobile

79.4

9.8

8.0

Carpenters

79.8

6.2

9.1

Electricians

86.3

6.2

5.8

Plumbers

86.3

4.9

6.3

Tool and die makers

93.5

2.1

2.8

Machinists

84.2

4.9

7.3

Total US population

77.9

10.4

8.1

Table IX. Apprenticeship and race in the USA, 1990.

The Dynamics of Affirmative Action in the United States of America since the 1960s It is clear that skilled work has increased for women in significant numbers in the United States since the 1960s. One central mechanism in this process has been the opening up of apprenticeships for women in a range of important skilled trades. It is also evident that skilled work has increased amongst Blacks and Hispanics over the same period to the extent that the proportion of skilled workers from such ethnic minority backgrounds increasingly approximates their overall proportions within the American population. Neither of these developments can be said to characterise Britain; indeed, the patterns of gender and ethnic exclusion within skilled work remain remarkably traditionalistic and archaic. This section will analyse how these changes were made in the United States and the broader social forces that helped stimulate them.

Since the 1940s in America, there has been an accelerating awareness of economic discrimination against both women and ethnic minorities, particularly blacks and more recently Hispanics. Since the 1950s there has been a growing social movement to eliminate such discriminatory practices. The 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade racial or ethnic (and 269


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sexual) discrimination in employment; and in 1972 the coalition of Black Trade Unionists was formed as an explicit effort to remove ethnic discrimination within the trade union movement itself. The Civil Rights Act was swiftly followed by President Johnson's Executive Order 11246 which required all contractors, services and producers engaged in work on federal contracts worth $10,000 or more per annum to give proof that they were equal opportunity employers. Failure to do so could lead to the cancellation of their projects and their future debarring from such federal projects. In relation to the skilled trades (traditional bastions of exclusion) the main Government effort attempted to improve the chances of non-whites and women obtaining entry to such work. In 1969, the Philadelphia Plan set up quotas for minorities in six building unions working on federally funded construction contracts in the Philadelphia area (Filippelli, 1984). This was followed by a series of voluntary Hometown programmes whereby union trade councils and contractors' associations in over 70 areas in America agreed to affirmative action in the area of recruitment into skilled work. The criticisms of the lack of enforcement of affirmative action by Government agencies such as the Office of Contract Compliance Programs, and the lack of any enforcing authority in the Hometown programmes, led to an increasing emphasis on efforts to change the patterns of recruitment into apprenticeships. The traditional pattern of nepotism was severely weakened by the implementation of the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act (Burstein, 1985). In particular, unions and employers are required to advertise vacancies for apprenticeship programmes and to base selection upon standardized tests. By 1975, 18.4% of apprentices in construction trades were non-white, which represented a significant improvement historically. Nevertheless, as Strauss (1973) has shown, blacks have tended to be concentrated in the 'mud trades' such as plastering, cementing and bricklaying, which were the trades in which there was a high proportion of blacks during the slave era. Blacks traditionally have found it far harder to enter the newer, higher status trades like electrician or sheetmetal worker. This asymmetry still remains a force in contemporary America, but there is some evidence that there is a convergence of ethnic proportions in various skilled trades (Table VII).

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The central battle in many plants has been over the seniority system. This can have two significant effects on entry into skilled work (Penn, 1990). First, seniority is a prerequisite for movement into skilled positions at the end of an internal career trajectory, and secondly, seniority can be used by nonskilled workers as a means of entering apprenticeship programmes. However, to be effective in the area of ethnic and gender discrimination, both require the existence of, at least, a plant-wide seniority system and the removal of traditional departmental seniority listings. A wide range of changes have been made by the courts in an attempt to improve the chances of blacks and women entering skilled work. Perhaps the most important was the decision of the US Supreme Court in 1977 in the case between Weber and the United Steelworkers of America. The Steelworkers had signed an agreement with Kaiser Aluminium to set up an apprenticeship programme for craft work wherein half of each intake would be reserved for female and/or minority workers. Weber, a white worker employed at Kaiser, who had more seniority and better qualifications than some of those selected for the programme, argued reverse discrimination. The Supreme Court ruled that collective bargaining could be used legitimately to correct prior discriminatory practices, provided that it was a temporary measure designed to achieve proportions of minority and female craft workers equivalent to those in the wider population (Holley & Jennings, 1984). More recently, Badgett (1995) has shown how the pressure of federal affirmative action requirements has led to an improvement in the relative position of black workers at a firm studied between the late 1960s and the late 1980s. In particular, black workers increased as a proportion of an increasingly skilled workforce as a result of in-company training programmes. The current climate in the United States has begun to run in a counter direction. In 1978 the Supreme Court made a celebrated, but complex judgement in the case of Bakke v Regents of the University of California. In that judgement, where Bakke challenged the use of racial quotas by UC Davis Medical School as discriminatory against him as a white person, the Supreme Court held that the particular scheme at UC Davis was unconstitutional but that other affirmative action programmes based on diversity were not. However, in a trio of recent cases (City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 1989; Metro 271


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Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC, 1990 and Adarand Contractor, Inc v Pena, 1995) the Supreme Court has challenged the use of racial set-aside quotas for contractors. This has extended the attack on affirmative action to contract relations between firms. Nevertheless, the state of affirmative action programmes remains ambiguous in contemporary America. The internal demographics of ethnic communities in the United States has changed significantly since the 1965 amendments to the immigration laws which removed most remnants of the Asian exclusion laws. Currently, around 80% of all legal immigration into the United States comes from Latin America, Asia and the Pacific Islands (Hing, 1995). During the 1980s the overall population of the United States increased by around 10%. However, the Asian Pacific American population increased more than doubled and the Latino population by over 50%. States like California have been particularly affected. Today one-quarter of Californians are Latinos and around 10% are Asian. This has led to a displacement of American blacks in the major conurbations, notably in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Inter-ethnic clashes have become more evident and were seen graphically in the riots in South Central Los Angeles in the immediate aftermath of the acquittal of the LAPD officers seen beating Rodney King on videotape. In particular, many Korean businesses in South Central appeared to have been targeted for arson and looting by local residents, many but not all of whom were black. There has also been persistent tension between blacks and various Asian groups in California. (Ramirez, 1995). Chinese-Americans have complained of discriminatory entrance quotas at San Francisco's prestigious Lowell High School (Dong, 1995). Elsewhere in America the diverse and often conflictual relations between ethnic minority groups have made a nonsense of attempts to avoid ethnic bias when redrawing electoral boundaries (Ramirez, 1995). It is clear that affirmative action programmes in the United States have become enmeshed in the increasing complexities of ethnic diversity. However, it is also evident that the drive for affirmative action after the mid 1960s has significantly affected the social composition of skilled work and of apprenticeship programmes. When US employers needed to recruit female and ethnic minority apprentices to comply with Federal contract regulations, they managed to find them. This 272



broke the vicious circle, evident still in Britain, whereby gender and ethnic exclusion is justified by statements from employers and training organisations that young women or young non-whites in Britain rarely apply for apprenticeships. At one level, this is undoubtedly correct, but this simply reveals the failure of relying on market forces to alter a deep seated set of discriminatory employment practices. In the current conjuncture there is no reason why employers or training organisations should attempt to 'rock the boat'. There are always plenty of young white men who desire an apprenticed trade and the likely resistance from trade unions and existing skilled workforces means that in current circumstances employers have no incentive to challenge these patterns. Conclusions It is evident that in certain respects the traditional social composition of skilled work still pertains in both Britain and America. Most skilled workers remain white and male. However, such a pattern has begun to change in the USA, whereas there is virtually no change in contemporary Britain. Why should this be so? The proximate answer is that there has been far more effort made in the USA, by Government, employers and unions to rectify the long-standing structures of discrimination. This has been particularly so in those industrial unions like the UAW where skilled workers have constituted a relatively small minority of the overall union membership. Affirmative action programmes have effected the social composition of skilled work in the USA. The changes should not be overestimated and are uneven in their extent, but there has been a profound transformation in skilled work in America since the mid-1960s. Legislation on discrimination in Britain has been weak and its enforcement half-hearted at best. This is because there are no equivalent movements in Britain to those of women, blacks and Hispanics in the USA. This is partly due to the hegemony of the labour movement in British society (Lash & Urry, 1987). In America, the labour movement determines the political agenda for reform far less than in Britain. In its absence, the women's and ethnic movements have had more salience. Such factors interact with the long-standing differing political traditions in America and Britain. American governments were far more likely to intervene in economic relationships in the USA, at least prior to the advent of President Reagan, than British governments who have shown a marked reluctance to act decisively in these areas of discrimination. In Britain, until very recently, it was the tradition to permit employers and employees to forge their own accommodations unfiltered by extensive interventionist legislation. The absence of a strong commitment by the labour movement in Britain to 273


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affirmative action on gender and ethnic discrimination, when coupled with a lack of systematic pressure from other types of social movements, has left the social composition of skilled work very much as it was at the beginning of this century. It is also clear that ethnic and gender segregation and exclusion are contingent features of modern capitalist societies. It is of major significance that these features of the traditional occupational structure have been weakened in what is arguably the purist example of contemporary capitalism. This is not to suggest, of course, that they have been eradicated in the USA. Landry (1988), amongst many, has shown that there remain marked ethnic and gender differences in employment in contemporary America. Nonetheless, it is clear that modern capitalism in America has acted as a corrosive to these patterns of discrimination. The paper demonstrates that ethnic and gender patterns of employment are neither universal, immutable nor inevitable in advanced societies. Their transformation remains a continuing political challenge. Correspondence Dr Roger Penn, Department of Sociology, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YW, United Kingdom ([email protected]). Note The data in this article is taken from the decennial censuses of population in Great Britain and the United States of America. Further details are to be found in Roger Penn, Class, Power and Technology (1990). References Amar, A.R. & Katyal, N.K. (1996) Bakke's fate, UCLA Law Review, pp. 1745-1781. Badgett, M.V. (1995) Affirmative action in a changing legal and economic environment, Industrial Relations, 34, pp. 489-506. BL Cars Ltd (n.d.) A Summary. London: CRE. Brest, P. & Oshige, M. (1995) Affirmation action for whom? Stanford Law Review, 47, pp. 855-900. Burstein, P. (1985) Discrimination, Jobs and Politics: the struggle for equal employment ppportunity in the United States since the New Deal. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cole, G.D.H. (1923) Trade Unionism and Munitions. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Commission for Racial Equality (1995) Checklists and Points of Action: TECS, LECS and racial equality. London: CRE. Dawson, A. (1977) The paradox of dynamic technological change and the labor aristocracy in the United States, 1880–1914, Labour History, 20, pp. 856-881.

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