apprentice became an adept in one or more of these, the employer had every interest in refraining from completing his knowledge of the trade. The employer thus got an expert's work in a process for an apprentice's allowance. As a consequence, the apprentice system was a live question with the journeymen, and every effort was made to regulate it. It threw many journeymen out of work as boys were substituted, because their wages were lower. The printers, tailors, ropemakers, bakers, and many trades in other branches of manufacturing were affected. There was great complaint that there was much hardship endured by workers in the various trades because "labor is so divided that what made one trade formerly, now makes half a dozen, and every working tool is simplified or improved—to say nothing of machinery."
- Besides the cheap labor of the apprentices, women provided another source of cheap labor. In 1837 women were employed in more than one hundred different trades. Women were used as compositors to break a printers' strike in the Philadelphia newspaper offices in the early 30's, and women seamstresses to break a strike of tailors in 1833 in New York. Cheap convict labor was employed in competition with free labor earlier in New York and Pennsylvania than in other states.—It was systematically used in Massachusetts in 1805, Vermont, in 1808, Maryland in 1811, and New Hampshire in 1812. As early as 1828 the New York and Auburn prisons became profitable undertakings to the state. In Connecticut (1828) the prisons also became profitable, as did those of Massachusetts (1832). The Sing Sing prison in 1835 made a profit of nearly $29,000. What, do you think, did the manufacturers who contracted for this prison labor make!
- 85. What organization form succeeded the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen?
- Organizations of central labor unions of the type of the Mechanic's Union of Trade Associations, which originated in Philadelphia in 1827.
- These unions cannot strictly be said to have followed the N. E. A. of F. M. and O. W., as the first one was
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