Abstract

"Automating Inequality: Technology, Apprenticeship, and the Civil Rights Struggle Over Skilled Work"

Neil Johnson, University of California, Santa Barbara (neilr_johnson@hotmail.com)

This paper examines the relationship between apprenticeship training and civil rights activism through the lens of the Joint Apprenticeship Program (JAP). In the mid-1950s, with the specter of automation and “structural unemployment” on the horizon, a wide range of civil rights groups set their sights on, as A. Philip Randolph put it, transforming “a body of unskilled workers into highly skilled, technical craftsmen and technological experts.” Established by the Workers’ Defense League (WDL) in 1962, the JAP aimed to effect such a transformation by preparing Black workers for high-wage jobs in the New York building trades. By the early 1970s, it was endorsed by the A. Philip Randolph Institute, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Department of Labor, and operating in 21 offices across 19 cities. Bayard Rustin called it “the most tremendous breakthrough in the drive to get minority youths into apprenticeship training.” In one sense, the Workers’ Defense League and the A. Philip Randolph Institute challenged the conventional wisdom about the relationship between “human capital” and inequality, illuminating how institutionalized discrimination in the labor market—rather than skills or training—locked Black workers into precarious, low-wage jobs. In another, the program illustrates some of the limitations inherent in the apprenticeship model of economic opportunity; as this paper will show, the JAP was immediately beset by spurious legal challenges mounted by the New York building trades. The history of these legal disputes, like the broader history of the civil rights struggle over apprenticeship, sheds new light on the fraught racial politics of the vocational, job training, and human capital-oriented solutions to deepening inequality that emerged during the 1960s.