The weekly Thibodaux sentinel and journal of the 8th Senatorial District. [volume] (Thibodaux, Lna. [i.e. La.]) 1875-1898, 1893-07-08
Thibodaux SentiueI.
TRADES-UNiON METHODS.

How Americans Are Excluded From the
Building Trades.
An extreme example of the way in
which this is done was furnished by
the agreements which the Journeymen
Plasterers' union of New York city in
duced the employers to sign in 1890 and
1892. By the first agreement, signedi in
1890, it was stipulated that no one was
to be taught the plastering trade in the
city for two years. This agreement
was kept. and at the end of two years
another was signed by which it was
stipulated that no one should be ad-
mitted to the plastering trade who had
not served an apprenticeship of five
years. When these agreements were
signed plastering, like most of the
building trades, was largely in the
hands of foreign-born workmen. The
effect of the two agreements, which are
still in force, has been to exclude native
born Americans from a good trade for
seven years. At the same time. foreign
workmen who may not have worked at
the trade over six months before COM
ing here are admitted as journeymen.
The effect of these agreements is to
keep the trade entirely in the hands of
foreigners.
AS we have said. this is an excep-
tional case, but it differs only in de-
gree from many others. In all the
trades Americans are Disseminated
against as much as possible, and
similar results to those accomplished
in the plastering trade are reached by
more mildly worded but no less effec-
tive rules: Thus, when an employer is
allowed two apprentices, and the APP
prentice is required to serve four years.
the employer can graduate only me
journeyman every other year. The
number of employers in any n trade
is not large, and such restrictions
amount virtually to an exclusion of
American young men from the trades.
At the sixth annual convention of the
Pennsylvania Association of Master
House-Painters and Decorators. held
at Scranton in January last, one of the
delegates read a paper on the APP
prentice system as observed in his
trade, in which he said that after a
personal investigation among at least
six hundred master painters and deco
rators of Philadelphia and vicinity he
had discovered that not an average
of one in fifteen had a single appren-
tice in his business, and that 1.-The
larger the workshop or establishment,
the greater seemed the adherence with
reference to the employment of boys to
learn the trade, many of the masters
going so far as to say, and with an evil
dent spirit of pride, that in all their ex-
pesence as masters, extending from
fifteen to thirty-fve years, and employ
ing from fifteen to fifty, and as high as
eighty, workmen, they had never both
cred their brains teaching a boy the
business
Evidence on this branch of the sub
ject could be multiplied indefinitely,
did space permit. We have quoted suf-
fciently to show that the old appren-
ticeship system has passed away. and
that no system of trade instruction has
been permitted to take its place inside
the trades themselves. We have also
shown that mi of the reasons for this,
though not the chief one, is the hos
tility of the foreign-bOrn workmen, who
control the trades, to workmen of
American birth.-The Century.