Published February 17. 2021 4:38PM
Rep. Joe Courtney
In 1937, a freshman member of Congress from Norwich, former Rep. William Fitzgerald, led a successful effort to enact America’s first and only National Apprenticeship Act. After being signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt, the Fitzgerald Act, as it is still known today, went on to buoy our nation through war and peace, boosting America’s economy and workforce by way of its Registered Apprenticeship system.
Fitzgerald was uniquely suited to spearhead this law. He started working in a Connecticut foundry as a teen and rose from the factory floor to the foreman’s office, then to commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Labor, mayor of Norwich, and member of Congress. In transcripts from his committee hearings, Fitzgerald described how as a 15-year-old he was exploited by unscrupulous employers, and passionately argued in favor of national standards in a Registered Apprenticeship Program to protect workers and ensure that the skill certificates they were laboring towards were of high quality.