SKILL AND THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER AT THE WORKPLACE — A review article.

The traditional route to skill was via apprenticeship but that word could mean many things, from exploitive apprenticeship to learning by regular service or learning from the master. During the second half of the nineteenth century learning by means of regular service was the most important form of apprenticeship in industry, especially in engineering, shipbuilding, printing and building. An apprentice who had served his time had a definite status but many industrial skills were learnt without the definite promise of reward, by migrating from machine to machine or shop to shop,and semi-skilled work was learnt by "following up," doing a full-time job while learning from the man above. In such cases the workers' control over the labor supply depended on the enforcement of seniority rules; classic cases being in cotton spinning and on the railways. The level of skill of course varied and is often hard to define. While Charles More has looked at skill in terms of earnings for the men and usefulness to the employer, Richard Price sees skill as one aspect, albeit a most important one, of the struggle between the men and the employer over the exercise of control at the workplace.