The Downside of Guilds

See ‘The European Guilds’ Review: Of Standards and Strangleholds by Marc Levinson. He reviews a book by Sheilagh Ogilvie. Excerpts:

"In a series of well-organized chapters, Ms. Ogilvie proceeds to challenge much of the existing historical literature. Some historians, for example, have contended that guilds protected consumers by ensuring product quality and setting maximum prices. She will have none of it. Guilds, she says, manipulated labor markets in order to control their members’ output and protect their profits, limiting workers’ pay (106 instances), making it hard for workers to change employers (221 instances) or regulating the number of workers, (454 instances). She identifies 96 cases in which guilds directly fixed output prices, and many more in which they kept new products out of the market. “For guilds,” she writes, “the size of the pie was finite, and the point of politics was to get a bigger piece of it for guild masters.” 

Many scholars have argued that guilds played a vital role in creating a skilled workforce. Guilds cultivated this image, leaving the impression that each would-be goldsmith or brick mason served a lengthy apprenticeship under the close supervision of a master, culminating in the completion of a masterwork. Ms. Ogilvie shows that such learning was the exception rather than the rule. There were flower-sellers’ guilds and sack-carriers’ guilds that had few skills to teach. Hundreds of guilds waived apprenticeship requirements for a master’s son, a son-in-law, or anyone willing to pay a fee. So many apprentices ran off that guilds were forced to shorten the terms of service: The average apprenticeship lasted 4.6 years before about 1500, but only 3.5 years after.

Far from creating a better workforce, Ms. Ogilvie argues, guilds created a less flexible one. “Guilds in most European societies were based on the principle that a man would learn a single craft or trade, practice it throughout his life, and never change occupations,” she writes. Women, descendants of serfs, Jews, the wrong sorts of Christians, and members of other out-of-favor groups were denied training altogether in order to forestall competition. Much potential human capital went to waste."

"Many of the ills Ms. Ogilvie attributes to guilds are equally attributable to governments. She notes, for example, that guilds sought to damp competition by restricting imports. Governments frequently did the same, for their own reasons, particularly once mercantilist thinking took root across Europe in the 17th century. Similarly, she reports that guilds of Venetian glassmakers and German metal workers sought to stop journeymen from going abroad so as to keep foreigners from learning technical secrets. But so did the British Parliament, which passed a law in 1719, when British guilds were in terminal decline, to prevent “Artificers in the Manufacturies” from leaving the country. There is no reason to think a guild-free Europe would have been more enthusiastic about the free flow of goods and ideas."