VOCATIONAL TRAINING AND THE ORIGINS OF COORDINATION
SPECIFIC SKILLS AND THE POLITICS OF COLLECTIVE ACTION
By Cathie Jo Martin
Boston University
cjmartin@bu.edu
Chapter contribution to The Comparative Political Economy of Collective Skill Systems
Marius R. Busemeyer & Christine Trampusch, eds.
Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011)
INTRODUCTION
This chapter investigates the emergence of divergent collectivist vocational training
systems at the dawn of the Twentieth-Century. In particular, I seek to understand how political
structures mediated changing demands for skills training at this highly-significant critical juncture,
when diverse actors struggled to evolve national responses to the rise of industrial production and
the industrial revolution prompted a break with the crafts tradition. Why did some collectivist
countries early on develop a national framework and strong role for the state in vocational training,
accord oversight over training and school-based instruction to the social partners and develop
portable industry-specific skills; while others failed to develop a national framework and
minimized the role of the state, left much control over competencies to individual firms’
apprenticeship programs and created firm-specific skills? Moreover, I look at how these
variations of the collectivist system diverge from a liberal model country, which experimented
with industrial school-based instruction but failed to develop credentialed skills and had few
apprentice slots.
I argue that the variations within vocational training systems reflect political struggles at
critical junctures, which are heavily shaped by the strategies and structures of the state. In
particular, two features of the state – the structure of party systems and degree of federalism – have
a crucial impact on the levels of both state commitment to vocational training and employers’
capacities for collective action. First, political features influence government’s ability to develop
enduring commitments to social spending. Multipartism (bolstered by the later introduction of
proportional representation) produces more enduring policy compromises than two-party
competition (and majoritarian electoral systems). Consensus settlements forged in coalition
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governments persist and welfare expenditures grow in the absence of radical regime shifts.
Moreover, nations with centralized authority find it easier to construct national policies for
regulation and social interventions, while federalist systems reinforce sectional and economic
divisions, and delegate state power to regional authorities, all of which depress spending.
Second, the structure of government has a crucial impact on employers’ organizational
capacities for collective action, most predominantly in the way that the political rules of the game
shaped incentives for constructing encompassing, peak employers’ associations. Variations in
employers’ associations, in turn, are critical to the development and forms of occupational skills
that emerged at the beginning of the Twentieth Century because associations had differing
capacities to solve the collective action problems inhibiting business support for training.
As I have argued elsewhere, the structure of party competition and federalism have a
critical impact on the development of peak employers’ associations. At the dawn of the
Twentieth-Century, right-oriented politicians in multi-party systems recognized that they were
unlikely to win electoral majorities, believed their business constituents were more likely to win
battles against labor alone in private negotiations than against labor and farmers in legislative
arenas, and therefore, nurtured and delegated authority to private corporatist channels for
policymaking. In highly-centralized countries, the associations also became centralized and
encompassing, while in countries with a significant federal delegation of authority, associations
remained stronger at the industry and regional level. In two-party systems, where employers
tended to be dispersed across parties, politicians cultivated business allies but did not unify
employers against their competitors in other social groups and had no incentives to delegate
authority, as they hoped to win outright electoral majorities (Martin and Swank, 2008, 2011).
2
Thus, countries with multi-party systems and centralized government produced
highly-coordinated corporatist associations, countries with multi-party systems and federal
governments created associations with an intermediate level of industrial sectoral coordination and
nations with two-party systems evolved pluralist associations.
The divergent patterns of association, in turn, had implications for the alliances between
diverse economic actors in policy battles and for the ways that internal splits between employers
were resolved. Many political and economic divisions existed during this period: business versus
agriculture, business versus labor, big industrialists versus small crafts producers, social partners
versus professional educators, social partners’ interest in self-regulation versus state intervention,
and national state intervention versus federal regional intervention.
The structure of association informed the political expression of these cleavages and had
bearing on the struggles over vocational training systems, by influencing the capacity of
employers to overcome their sectoral divisions, to engage in associational oversight of the content
of skills training in both apprenticeships and school-based instruction, and to produce
industry-specific, portable skills. The nature of political competition and employer association
mattered to venue of training (and the ways the two were integrated), to the type of specific skills
(firm versus industry), to the portability of specific assets, and to levels of state subsidy. In
countries with highly-coordinated macro-corporatist employers’ associations, the social partners
were given a crucial role in the oversight and credentialing of vocational training comparatively
early, while in collectivist countries with sectoral coordination, individual firms or industry-level
bodies retained greater control. Macro-corporatist countries – in comparison to ones with
sectoral coordination – were more likely to retain a role for the state through social partnerships
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with business and labor, to rely to a greater extent on school-based training, and to create
industry-level rather than firm-level specific skills. Employers in countries with national
encompassing associations were also more willing to tolerate high levels of spending on
vocational training, because they had significant input into the process and trusted that policy
outcomes would satisfy their business needs.
Using comparative case analyses of Germany, Denmark and the United States, I show that
political features shaped patterns of peak associations and that these, in turn, had a significant
impact on the emergence of vocational training systems. For example, German federalism
reinforced the deep regionally-based sectional divisions between heavy and light industry and no
single national business party emerged to organize employers into a unitary peak association in the
Nineteenth-Century. Weimar efforts to create comprehensive oversight committees of business
and labor in vocational training were heavily constrained by the legacies of competing peak
associations and parties, and industrialists in cutting-edge sectors were unable to wrest control
over training form the handicraft sectors.
In Denmark, centralized government and more complete coverage of economic groups by
the party system meant that the business, farmers, and workers each had a partisan home. Fearing
democratization, the Right Party (Højre) created strong peak business and labor organizations and
allocated power to private policymaking channels because it calculated that business would lose
less in direct collaboration with workers through extra-parliamentary corporatist channels than in
parliamentary fights against workers and farmers (Martin and Swank, 2009). Oversight
committees composed of the social partners in vocational training followed earlier patterns
established in industrial relations and eased the social partners’ effort to control certification and
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the content of school-based learning. This control meant that employers could trust schools to
deliver real skills; school-based instruction allowed for the emergence of industry-specific skills
rather than firm-specific skills; and employer came to tolerate high levels of state spending in
vocational training.
In the U.S., two-party competition and federal competition led to the absence of industrial
self-regulation by employers and trade unions. Consequently, the development of the training
system was strongly influenced by professional school reformers who integrated training into
public schools.
This argument has important implications for modern debates about dualism and
solidarism (Martin 2004; Martin and Thelen 2007; Swank and Martin 2009). The Danish model,
emerging at the beginning of the Twentieth-Century, set the stage for solidaristic policies, by
embracing the skills needs of a wide range of workers. Denmark’s greater reliance on schools to
train workers at all skills levels (see chapter of Moira Nelson in this volume) – not only
highly-skilled apprenticeships – left a legacy of attention to the skills needs of all manual workers
and this, in turn, helped the country to avoid the insider-outsider dynamics separating German
workers.
VARIETIES OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING REGIMES
In the opening chapter of this volume, Busemeyer and Trampusch suggest that initial
vocational training systems vary, first, in firms’ involvement and willingness to invest in the
development of polyvalent skills and, second, in public commitment to the development of skills.
These permutations of highs and lows produce four distinctive regime types: liberal countries have
a limited involvement of both firms and state, statist nations have a low level of firm involvement
5
but a high level of state commitment; and segmentalist countries have high levels of firm
involvement with low state commitment. Finally, collectivist systems – the object of this volume
– have high levels of involvement by firms as well as commitment by states, and these
partnerships, often including labor as well, deliver copious portable, certifiable skills. This
dispersion has bearing on various characteristics of vocational training system: venue (i.e. statist
systems tend to rely on schools rather than firms, while segmentalist systems do the opposite),
certification of skills (wholely firm-based systems tend to develop non transferrable skills), levels
of public subsidies (obviously higher in systems with state commitment), and linkages to the
political economy. Thus, collectivist skills systems (largely found within the coordinated market
economies) differ from liberal systems in three important ways: Employers are involved in
administration of training; training provides portable, certified occupational skills; and dual
systems organize training through company-based apprenticeships and school-based instruction
(see the introduction of Busemeyer and Trampusch in this volume). ).
One also finds a dispersion of countries even within the collectivist system on these
dimensions. For example, Germany appears closer to the upper right corner (and to Japan) in
both the level of state commitment (lower) and the level of firm involvement/control (higher),
while Denmark appears closer to the lower left (and to Sweden and France) in both the level of
state commitment (higher) and the level of firm control (lower). Variations in commitment by
firms and state produce distinctions in the vocational training systems, such as in the types of
portable specific skills. Thus, while German workers gain firm-specific skills, Danish ones gain
specific skills that can be carried to other firms within the industry (Estevez-Abe et. al, 2001) and
while the firm-based specific assets of Germany have about 300 different categories of
6
occupations, the industry-based specific assets of Denmark have about 80 to 100 (Busemeyer,
2009).
Countries relying on a dual vocational training model differ in the relative importance of
firm-based apprenticeships and school-based instruction: thus while the firm apprenticeships are
of primary importance to the training of skilled workers in the German system, dual-system
countries such as Denmark and Austria have relied relatively more on school-based instruction and
the French model (Greinert, 2005.) Countries also vary on the oversight mechanisms for
reconciling the school and work-based apprenticeship training, specifying the content of
educational instruction in both realms, and making adjustments in response to broad changes in the
political economy. Thus, while Denmark had gone far in creating a national system for
employer-union regulation of the vocational training system with acts in 1921 and 1937,
comparable legislation was not passed in Germany until 1969 and German firms continued to be,
in large part, responsible for defining the content of skills. Germany is usually viewed as the
dominant collectivist skill system; therefore, one wonders why some consensual countries deviate
from the German model. Following the introduction of this volume, Table 1 illustrates the
variations in vocational training systems along the broad dimensions of apprenticeship-based
versus school-based and certified, portable skills versus non-certified portable skills.
– Table 1 about here –
The essential question is why do we find this divergence of skills formation systems,
especially within the coordinated variety of capitalism? Germany is usually viewed as the
dominant collective skill system within consensual countries. Thus, we need to understand why
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collectivist countries developed differently in both the degrees of involvement by key actors and in
their ultimate design of vocational training.
THE POLITICAL DETERMINANTS OF SKILLS REGIMES
My core argument is that the political features of government have crucial impacts on the
evolution of collective skill regimes: these influence the levels of state commitment to training and
employers’ capacity to act toward their collective goals and, consequently, the details of the plans.
First, both multipartism and governmental centralization enable states to make a greater
commitment to social spending. Multiparty proportional systems tend to offer a more complete
coverage of interest groups than majoritarian systems; consequently, parties can more readily
assure their constituents that they will stand by their policy promises and this capacity for credible
commitments enhances voters’ trust in government (Kitschelt, 1993; Cusack et. al., 2007) Even
employers in proportional systems seem more willing to pay higher taxes, as they feel that they are
getting something for their money, and are more willing to acquiesce to state control over funding
decisions. Multi-party systems also tend to have fewer dramatic policy shifts, as coalition
governments develop relatively-enduring consensus positions, and these enduring deals make
government interventions more palatable to employers. In addition, centralization of
governmental authority obviously makes polities more national and encompassing; in sharp
contrast, federalism augments regional divisions, and competing locales may diminish social
spending in a “race to the bottom” to attract business investment.
Second, political structures – party systems and federalism – also have indirect impacts on
the development of collective skills systems, in molding diverse forms of encompassing
employers’ associations: macrocorporatism, sectoral coordination and pluralism (Martin and
8
Swank, 2008, 2011). Multiparty systems have higher coverage of specific groups; therefore,
employers are more likely to belong to a single party (although in federal systems of government,
these dedicated business parties are likely to remain at the regional level). Dedicated business
parties inspire coordination, by focusing attention on common goals among constituents and
making credible promises to members that the party platforms will remain true to constituent
concerns (Kitschelt, 1993; Cusack, Iversen and Soskice, 2007). Coalition governments – the
norm in multiparty systems – further encourage cooperation among competing interests (who must
form governments) and stable policy outcomes. Leaders of business parties have incentives to
delegate policymaking authority to private channels, because they are unlikely to win electoral
majorities: Their constituents are more likely to secure favorable policy outcomes in direct
negotiations with workers than in parliamentary processes.
In comparison, two-party systems tend to consist of catch-all parties that bring varied
constituency groups under the partisan umbrella; employers may be dispersed among parties, and
parties may seek to cultivate competing business associations; and employers may feel that no
single group speaks for them and are less likely to believe the policy promises of party leaders,
because parties’ positions fluctuate to attract the median voter (Downs, 1957). Party leaders may
be less willing to delegate policymaking authority to private actors, because they are less identified
with these actors and because they have hopes of winning outright electoral victories.
Federalism also matters enormously to the formation of peak employers’ associations:
Centralized governments produce national, centrally-organized and regionally-homogenous
parties, because the political action largely takes place at the national level, and these countries
tend to engender well-organized corporatist associations as well (Coleman 1987). In stark
9
contrast, parties and public policies tend to vary materially and ideologically across regions in
federal systems of government with decentralized political authority. This geographical variation
engenders regionally fragmented associations, because region is where much of the policy-making
action takes place (Hawley 1966; Amorin and Cox 1997). While centralized party systems are
more likely to produce class-based political cleavages, federal party systems often divide the
electorate along class, regional, religious, and/or ethnic lines and are more likely to include
employers and workers together in the same party (Van Keesbergen and Manow 2009).
Thus several types of associations are possible with various permutations of state structure.
First, centralized, multiparty systems tend to produce encompassing and highly-coordinated
corporatist associations with a high level of state involvement (“macrocorporatism”). These
party systems delegate significant policy-making authority to the peak associations, but industrial
relations systems retain a strong role for government, because employers trust that their dedicated
business parties will represent their interests in political channels. Second, countries with
two-party systems (either centralized or decentralized) tend to produce pluralist employer
representation, in which no unitary peak group can claim to speak for collective business interests.
These party systems do not delegate much policymaking authority to organized business and
labor; because even when one party becomes significantly linked to business (e.g. the US
Republican Party in 1896), the business-oriented party can hope to win an outright majority.
Third, federalist, decentralized multi-party systems are likely to produce high levels of employer
coordination at the industry level (sectoral coordination), but have weaker peak associations and
less state involvement. Federal multi-party systems have difficultly producing dedicated national
business parties, because sectional divisions remain salient. While politicians on the right may
10
wish to delegate political authority to business, the absence of a single business party makes
employers more resistant to state oversight (Martin and Swank, 2008, 2009).
Encompassing employers’ associations play a pivotal role in vocational training
development, because these help to solve two types of collective action problems. First,
collectivist training requires a mechanism to overcome a free rider problem of firms seeking the
benefits of training without bearing the costs. Variation in skill training regimes has to do with
firms’ abilities to resist constraints on their autonomy and too much autonomy results in an
under-supply of training (see the chapter of Busemeyer and Trampusch in this volume). Yet, this
negative constraint on employers’ autonomy is only half of the story; the positive capacity of
employers to act toward their collective interests is also important and highly-coordinated
employers’ associations can help firms to achieve their positive interests. Thus, second,
collectivist training also requires a mechanism for employers to engage in the joint creation,
credentialing and monitoring of skills training, and too little autonomy results in the
under-participation of employers in the training process – a situation that leaves training
essentially up to the state.
The specific forms of peak employers’ associations have an impact on collectivist skills
systems in (1) the venue and scope of training, (2) the types and portability of assets in that
programmatic oversight of the content of training programs influences the development of specific
versus general skills and firm-level versus industry level skills, and (3) the levels of training and
public subsidies.
First, the profile of employers’ associations have implications for the venue and scope of
training. Firm-controlled apprenticeships are more focused on the needs of highly-skilled
11
workers than their less-skilled brethren; therefore, when training decisions are made by
encompassing employers’ and labor associations, less-skilled industrial workers are likely to
obtain more training (because their unions speak for them). Moreover, industrial schools were
initially developed to meet the needs of less-skilled industrial workers, who could not obtain
training through the old guild-controlled apprenticeship systems. The content of training
programs in these schools in macrocorporatist countries is more likely to be proscribed by social
partner oversight committees and, consequently, to produce skills that are linked to real work
content and are significantly better for less-skilled industrial workers. Encompassing peak
organizations thus produce more inclusive and encompassing skills systems that transcend sectoral
and regional variation and provide skills training for a broader cross-section of workers.
Second, the profile of employers’ associations matters to the types and portability of
assets: the programmatic oversight of the content of training institutions influences the
development of specific versus general skills, and firm-level versus industry level skills. In
particular in school-based systems, more encompassing employers’ associations are more likely to
have the capacity to link skills obtained through training to the real needs of firms. This is
especially important to school-based skills development, where there is a greater possibility that
course work will not deliver the appropriate skills and it is not by accident that liberal countries
lacking strong employers’ associations have great difficulty delivering portable, certified
occupational skills. Moreover, when school-based training institutions are developed through
collective bargaining and tripartite policymaking channels, the needs of the social partners are
likely to be given greater attention vis-a-vis the interests of professional educators.
12
Third, the nature of employers’ associations have implications for the levels of training and
public subsidies, in solving collective action problems and in exposing employers to positive
information about human capital investment. The interests of employers in securing a skilled
workforce can be a major political boon in the creation of collectivist systems, through legislation,
tripartite commissions and collective bargaining rounds (Martin and Swank, 2004). Rothstein
(1988) has observed that employers setting in corporatist oversight committees have been coopted
into supporting expansion of the budgets for the governmental departments under their jurisdiction
and this constitutes a reason for the growth of welfare states. Employers in encompassing
associations are more likely to tolerate higher tax burdens, that enable higher subsidies for skills
training and a better skilled workforce. Moreover, once a system of coordinated labor relations
has been set into place, employers have reduced incentives to use their apprentices either as a
source of low wage labor and or as a reserve army of the semi-employed to break strikes.
Employers’ associations and unions seek to preserve peaceful labor relations to sustain their
jurisdictional authority over policymaking; this creates incentives to sustain apprenticeships that
fit easily into the broader parameters of the labor market relationship.
My focus on the political determinants of skill building institutions is not intended to
preclude other determinants, as employers preferences for specific skills are also influenced by
patterns of industrialization and labor relations. The development of vocational education and
training is intertwined with the formation of national labor markets (Clark and Winch, 2007), and
training regimes evolve in tandem with unemployment insurance regimes (Trampusch, 2010).
Varieties of capitalism co-vary with types of electoral institutions (Martin and Swank, 2008;
13
Iversen and Soskice, 2009) and both types of influences are relevant to the emergence of
vocational training systems.
First, we might well imagine that greater “firm specificity” in training happens in countries
with large-sized firms and with oligarchical industry sectors, in which a few large firms dominate
each industrial sector. Thus, it would make sense that Germany has more firm-based training
because it has larger firms, that use their employers’ associations to secure regulatory systems
governing skills development that suit their needs. Denmark should have a more collective,
school-based training system because its small and medium-sized enterprises are less able to
provide in-house training and because the firms recruit from the same occupational labor markets.
(On Denmark’s “small-holder economy,” see Kristensen and Sabel, 1997). This argument also
has implications for the relationship between school-based and firm-based VET. The opposition
to school-based VET in Denmark should be lower (as it is among small firms in Germany),
because providing parts of the training in schools (especially in the first years when the
productivity of apprentices is not yet high) saves costs for the cost-sensitive SMEs. In
comparison, large German firms would prefer to invest, themselves, in training, especially if they
can retain control over the process and restrict the role of unions and the state (see the chapter of
Thelen and Busemeyer in this volume).
While this argument has much merit, cross-national differences in firm size at the
beginning of the Twentieth-Century were substantially different from those a century later.
While firm size has been given as a reason for the slow pace of industrialization in France and the
rapid pace in Germany, in fact, Kinghorn and Nye (1996, 97) suggest that the opposite holds true:
the average number of workers in manufacturing plants was 67 in the US, 64 in Britain, 26 in
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France, and 14 in Germany. Moreover, if one concentrates only on the proportion of workers in
giant plants (with over 1000 employees), countries with very different vocational training systems
had relatively similar percentages of workers in the largest factories: 14 percent in the United
States, 12 percent in Britain, 9 percent in Canada, 8.8 percent in Sweden, 8.6 percent in Germany,
8.5 percent in France, and 8.3 percent in Austria (Hannah, no date, 37). The measures for
Germany undoubtedly reflect its economic dualism – while northern Germany had quite large
firms in key industrial sectors by the beginning of the Twentieth-Century, the south had much
smaller-sized firms. But the apprenticeship system developed within handicrafts, where firm size
was much smaller than in the industrial sectors. In addition, Sweden had larger firms than
Denmark, but relied even more on school-based vocational training. Moreover, firms’ needs vary
under different economic circumstances; for example, large firms in the post-industrial economy
demand more general, tertiary education for their workers than small firms, and countries with
predominantly larger firms have advanced more in developing these programs (Culpepper, 2007,
622). Thus, it makes sense to look more deeply at other types of factors and at the historical
record for an understanding of the evolution of vocational training.
It is also true that national systems of vocational training are more difficult to introduce
into countries in which significant regional economic and religious distinction preclude easy
agreement. Countries in which politics is largely divided along the economic class cleavage may
more easily nurture class compromise on industrial relations than countries in which the class
cleavage is complicated by regional and religious differences (Van Kersbergen and Manow 2009).
Yet, as was earlier suggested, federalist forms of government greatly reinforce economic and
religious cleavages. While regional economic differences undoubtedly played an important part
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in keeping all kinds of industrial policies off the national agenda in the United States,
manufacturers in the early Twentieth-Century had fairly similar concerns. But eighty-five
percent of the largest industrial plants were located in the Northeast and their interests were
consistently blocked by legislators from predominantly agricultural states. Divisions between
industry and agriculture were significantly more important than differences within industry to the
failure of coordination (See Bensel 2000, Martin 2006).
Second, the organization of labor was enormously important to the evolution of
skills-building institutions and on the specific nature of industrial skills. As Trampusch (2010) has
shown in her comparative historical analysis of the development of skill systems in Denmark, the
Netherlands, and Switzerland,a focus on employers’ preferences for collectivist training systems,
however, does not preclude parallel attention to the nature of labor organization in guiding the
political preferences of workers. Indeed, business and labor associations developed in
conjunction in many countries and should be viewed as mutually-reinforcing explanatory
variables.
Moreover, pre-industrial guilds created a crucial economic legacy for industrial life, by
cementing norms of highly-skilled labor and non-market competition; guilds depressed wage
competition among employers and set the stage for high skills production. Firms using
highly-skilled workers are more likely to organize in order to train collectively and to secure labor
peace. National skills levels are closely tied to pre-industrial guild traditions, as guilds facilitated
vocational training systems, allowed firms to develop specific assets, and enabled the development
of a skills-based export sector (Galenson 1952; Unwin, 1966; Thelen, 2004; Cusack, Iversen, and
Soskice, 2007; Hall and Soskice 2001).
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Yet while attention to preindustrial guilds accounts for why specific skills are maintained
in coordinated countries and sheds light on the linkages between skills systems, welfare systems,
industrial relations systems and firms’ strategies (Cusack, Iversen, Soskice, 2007; Martin, Swank,
2008; Iversen, Stephens, 2008; Trampusch, 2010), this explanation offers more limited insight into
the variations in skills regimes within coordinated market economies. Guilds also had a political
of fractious infighting among employers divided along craft lines (Bruun 1931). Moreover, there
was a growing disconnect between handicraft skills and industrial skills in the latter
Nineteenth-Century, as industrialization “swept away the long-standing craft-based vocational
training that had been practiced in more or less the same way in all European countries for
centuries” (Greinert, 2005, 9). The industrial revolution demanded new types of training for
less-skilled industrial workers, created a demand for less-intensive school-based instruction, and
lead to greater differentiation across countries. While guild apprenticeships were vital to
journeymen’s skills, other types of training such as school-based instruction also became
important to the creation of skills for semi-skilled industrial workers (Greinert, 2005; Fink).
Finally, my emphasis on the causal salience of the structure of parties is not meant to
discount the specific content of political parties. As Iversen and Stephens (2007) have noted,
while both Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties favor significant levels of welfare
state spending, the CD parties are less committed to the interests of lower status workers than the
SD ones. We might well expect partisan differences to translate into varying patterns of
vocational training as well, and indeed, in the period following the second world war, social
democratic parties demonstrated much stronger support for low-skilled workers than Christian
Democratic parties (Iversen).
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THE DAWN OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING SYSTEMS
I now investigate the initial emergence of vocational training systems in Denmark,
Germany and the United States in the late Nineteenth- and early Twentieth centuries, a critical
juncture when the rise of industrial capitalism demanded new skills and training institutions.
First, I show how political features of government shaped the development of peak employers’
associations. Second, I consider how the specific forms of association had an impact on the
capacities for self-regulation by the social partners in labor market policies. Third, I examine the
growing need for new skills for manufacturing workers, the business movements for industrial
education and training, and the efforts of manufacturing employers to gain influence in
skills-building processes. Fourth, I explore how this industrial movement for self-regulation
played out in the dimensions of vocational training systems, such as the mechanisms for oversight
over apprenticeships and school-based instruction. I suggest that the specific nature of skills was
forged in these early battles over vocational training.
Denmark
The Danish system of vocational training has a very high level of certified skills and relies
on a dual system in which apprenticeship positions play a somewhat secondary role to
school-based instruction. The role of the social partners has always been exceedingly strong in
determining the content and in providing oversight of vocational training, and this has been the
case since the Danish model of industrial relations was put into place with the September
Compromise of 1899. At an early stage, social partners became responsible for proscribing the
content of vocational education, industry was able to form an alliance with labor to win a collective
18
skills institution system, and business and labor representatives worked to develop real
qualifications (Nielsen and Cort, 1999, 4; chapter of Nelson in this volume).1
Our conundrum is how Denmark has such a high level of coordination in collective
bargaining, had strong oversight at an early stage by employers and labor, did not retain control in
the handicraft sectors (as in Germany), and diverged from the German system in its much stronger
emphasis on the school-based component. The perplexities of the Danish vocational training
framework can only be viewed in light of the very high levels of coordination among business and
labor (see also Juul; Trampusch, 2010); which, in turn, reflects the features of the Danish state
(Martin and Swank, 2009).
First, the emergence of Danish macro-corporatism was heavily shaped by the structure of
centralized, multi-party political competition and the incentives of the Right Party, Højre, to move
policymaking out of the parliamentary realm and into private channels. In this centralized,
multi-party system, partisan representation was focused and differentiated: Højre (and
subsequently the Conservative Folk party) increasingly concentrated on representing business
interests during this period, while the Social Democrats represented labor and the Liberal Party
(Venstre) represented farmers. Fearing the rising power of the Social Democrats, Højre initially
sought to combat labor radicalism with vote coalitions with the farmers’ party, Venstre; however,
the experiment failed, as Højre lost a quarter of its parliamentary seats (Nørgaard Petersen, 218).
Højre then helped to create the first peak employers’ association, the Employers’ Federation of
1896, both for its own electoral ambitions and to delegate considerable policy-making power to the
1
Grave concerns over the low number of apprenticeships in the late 1980s prompted employers, unions and the state
to embark on a campaign to expand these positions over the course of the 1990s. In keeping with other movements in
the welfare state (such as in active labor market policy), training options became more decentralized, privatized and
varied with the rise of neoliberal, new public management conceptions of good government.
19
social partners. Most importantly, Højre wanted to present a unified business voice in the fight
over workmen’s compensation policy, which motivated the effort to bring virtually the entire
business community into the employers’ federation, and to move control over many labor market
issues to a system of private self-regulation, where business was expected to win more than it
would against a farmer-labor coalition. The employers’ federation sought to unify all employers
around its position, and waged a campaign to bring the handicraft sectors into the employers’
federation (DA – Korrespondance, General udgånde 1896 6 30 til 1899 9 21, Erhvervsarkivet,
Aarhus, DK; see also Agerholm and Vigen, 1921).
Second, the very early unification of a broad cross-section of business into the employers’
association enabled employers and workers to gratify their desires for industrial self-regulation.
Employers, in fact, lobbied individual trade unions to form an encompassing labor organization
(LO) and took a very moderate line after winning a huge industrial conflict, the “Great Lockout” of
1899. This resolution established employers’ control over the organization of work, transferred
power over labor policy to the social partners, and yet retained a supervisory role for government.
The groundwork for the Danish system of business and labor self-regulation was established with
the September Compromise: Employers would retain control over the organization of work, but a
court of arbitration was established to rule on matters of industrial conflict and labor had
significant input into various areas of industrial and social life (Due and Madsen, 26; Due et. al.
1994, p. 80-81).
Third, industrial firms expressed a growing interest in controlling the development of
skills, in particular, for their semi-skilled workers. The free trade legislation in 1857 ended guild
control over apprenticeship exams and contracts, resulting in a decline of apprenticeship exams,
20
and at the same time, industrial production was motivating a need for new and somewhat different
skills. A growing skills gap brought industrialists to demand a more regulated plan for
apprenticeships, as they were anxious that socialist organizations not take charge of the training
process. Industrial schools sprang up, many created by local guilds as a supplement to
apprenticeship training and some (such as the railroad schools) developed as a mechanism for
educating the rising number of lower-skilled industrial workers who were not on track to take
journeymen exams. Finally, the Apprenticeship Act of 1889 stabilized the apprenticeship system
by creating new rules about the journeyman contract (Boje and Fink 1990, 126-31).
Industry was becoming increasingly important to the Danish economy compared to
handicrafts, the Apprenticeship Act of 1889 created an unstable compromise and employers
wanted to wrest control away from the guilds and to exercise self-regulation in the apprenticeship
relationship (Juul). While handicraft production claimed 80 percent of non-agricultural workers
in 1850, by 1903 industry had a larger share of national income than handicrafts and was 150
percent as large by 1916; moreover, growth was especially strong in those companies with over
100 workers, with a high degree of mechanization, with a production strategy that relied on an
interchangeable parts principle, and with largely low-skilled workers (constituting as much as 80
percent of the workforce). New Taylor-inspired production techniques precipitated growing
divisions between skilled foremen and the less skilled rank and file. Technical schools were
clearly geared more to the training needs of these larger firms than apprenticeship programs,
consequently, while handicraft production dominated and apprenticeships were the training
vehicle of choice for employers before the 1890s, the period from 1890 to 1920 was something of
21
a transitional period with the growing importance of school-based education (Boje and Fink, 1990,
134-5,125).
Fourth, the strong capacities of industrial firms with the early establishment of an
encompassing, peak employers’ organization enabled these firms to act on their emergent interests
in industrial skills, and to construct a system that moved control away from the handicraft sectors.
The September Compromise did not pertain to vocational training, and national oversight over the
content of skills by the social partners transpired in stages. In 1909, a tripartite negotiation in the
Molder industry grappled with a skills deficit facing the industry: while technical schools had
supplemented apprenticeships in educating workers in the past, technological change and
specialization were transpiring so quickly that both employers and unions felt that the content of
education could not be left to the discretion of the school. An Apprenticeship Committee,
composed of representatives from the employers’ association and the union, developed an
educational plan for a trade school set up in the Technical Enterprise School in Copenhagen. The
implementation of the plan resulted in a marked improvement in the education of molders, and
represented the first time that employers and workers had, themselves, developed a specific
educational program in a handicraft sector rather than relying on assorted courses offered by
technical schools. This innovation – to have the social partners specify the content of industrial
education rather than leaving it to the traditional educational process – came to constitute the
model for all industrial and handicraft education (Boje and Fink, 1990, 137-8).
Postwar firms had countered labor’s violent demands for wage increases with collective
negotiations, and vocational training became a mechanism for dampening radical demands (Dansk
Arbejdsgiverforening, 1946, 9-10, 14). The Apprenticeship Law of 1921 thus took further steps
22
in the evolution of the modern vocational training system, while stopping short of moving to a full
system of consensual oversight by the social partners. The act gave the social partners some
formal responsibility over apprenticeships by stipulating that occupational committees could form
to weigh in on significant choices concerning apprenticeships and technical education; moreover,
the law specified that if employers’ associations and unions in individual sectors requested and set
the terms for apprenticeship examinations, the Minister for Education would hold such
journeymen tests. The act also recognized that technological change had created a growing group
of low-skilled and unskilled workers, whose training needs lay outside of the apprenticeship
framework, and determined that these workers should be brought into the policies covering
apprenticeships and training (Boje and Fink, 1990, 137-8). Given the diversity of sectoral
interests, the coalition of parties decided to leave much of the control over apprenticeships to the
social partners in each sector and the bill ultimately passed with support from a coalition of the
center and right (Conservatives, Venste, and Radicale Venstre) (Arbejdersgiveren, 1921, 155).2
While the 1921 Apprenticeship Act extended social partners’ jurisdiction over
apprenticeships, the technical education part of the formula remained beyond their jurisdiction; the
plethora of trade schools and technical institutes continued to grow in spontaneous, pluralist
fashion, without oversight and with no formal integration of practical training and technical
education. Schools became increasingly differentiated with technological change; for example,
2
Social Democrat Thorvald Stauning initially proposed legislation in the 1919-20 parliamentary cycle and a strong
oversight function was included in Stauning’s version. But the Venstre Party objected that the proposal intervened
excessively into the personal relationship between apprentice and master; moreover, Venstre wanted to prevent
collaboration between the employers’ association and the labor movement. Employers supported the oversight
committees with employers and union representation, but joined Venstre in opposing a measure that allowed an
apprenticeship committee to refuse to recognize an apprenticeship contract should it determine that the firm had too
many apprenticeships (Juul YEAR???, 10). Legislation was proposed again in 1920-21, but this time by Venstre and
the center and right parties voiced a very strong desire to push the law through in that session. The majority
center-right coalition broke with the left on a number of issues supported by various industrial sectors, but ultimately
gave the Interior Ministry the job of recognizing the apprenticeship contract (Arbejdsgiveren, 1921, 124-5, 351-2).
23
Fordism created a need for both entry-level technical education for semi-skilled workers and
technical schools for those playing a supervisory role in the production process. Growing
specialization and the emerging army of low-skilled workers – particularly in the iron and metal
industries – posed a significant problem for quality control of work output, in the absence of much
direction in formal education, and employers in the metal industry were inspired by the earlier
experiments by the Molders in 1909 to oversee the development of an educational course that
sufficiently met the skills needs of the industry (Fink, 1990, 140-4).
The Apprenticeship Act of 1937 addressed these concerns by forming occupational
committees within each area and a broad apprenticeship council with representation by the social
partners, that accorded them jurisdictional autonomy in monitoring vocational education in the
classroom as well as on the shop floor. Both business and labor shared an interest in ensuring that
vocational training would live up to a certain standard of education: employers did not wish to
fund poorly-educated new apprenticeships and labor did not want unskilled workers who were
only interested in going on their unemployment funds. The committee structure built on the
Metal Industry Apprenticeship Committee, created a few years earlier to guide vocational training.
Once again, Venstre voted against the act because the party feared that it tread too strongly upon
individual relationships, and Venstre spokesman Jens Villemoes called the bill “a piece of
practical Socialism.” While the Conservative People’s Party supported the broad concerns of the
act, it also voted against the end result due to the limits on firms’ rights to take on apprenticeships
(Juul 11-13). Moreover, the Conservatives wanted to release apprentices in gardening from the
law and to establish parallel committees for industry/crafts and trade, rather than unifying all parts
of the economy into a single committee (Arbejdsgiveren, 1937, 372; Juul private correspondence.)
24
Yet the DA leadership was supportive of the act, despite misgivings among some members, as
were “free-thinking men” within the association. They viewed the occupational committees as
“an overwhelmingly valuable organ for carrying out training and education and that can give
apprenticeships a higher quality...This is a social act in which employers and workers operate
completely together” (Dansk Arbejdsgiverforening, 1946, 67.) DA’s Arbejdsgiveren (1937,
389-90), concluded with characteristic Danish understatement:
“It is obvious that a secure vocational education, based on an established practicum with a
Master, is of greatest significance for the future of technical crafts...Both employers and
workers have a high level of interest in a well-ordered apprenticeship relationship...The
Law has made a fruitful collaboration between employers and workers, and between
industrial sectors and the authorities highly possible, and if this collaboration grows as
planned, the new Apprentice Law will not be a very bad law” (Arbejdsgiveren, 1937,
389-90, translation by C.J. Martin, but see also Juul).
Germany
Germany has a dual vocational training system in which firm-based apprenticeships are
supplemented by school-based instruction (which plays a more minor role than in Denmark).
Small firms have historically dominated vocational training and large industrial firms have
obtained skilled labor from the small handicraft firms, who used apprentices as a source of cheap
labor. A national system emerged quite late, and the comprehensive national system of
business-labor oversight that finally came in 1969 continued to delegate authority to industrial
level bodies; moreover, educational choices were largely determined by Lander for many years
and significant unevenness characterizes the German system (Smart, 1975, 153).
25
I posit that the German vocational training system reflects the country’s medium level of
sectoral coordination, that, in turn, was shaped by the features of the German polity. The
existence of competing peak employers’ associations and dominance of sectoral coordination
meant that German employers had greater difficulty achieving self-regulation in vocational
training. While industrial cooperation was a popular ideology across the industrialized world in
1890s, German employers fought within themselves, during a period when employers’ desires for
national industrial policies motivated firms elsewhere to join forces. In the early
Twentieth-Century, some companies pursued intra-company, welfare capitalist strategies to train
their workers (Dunleavy and Welskopp 2007). This complicated subsequent efforts to introduce
a national training framework and kept control over skills development in the hands of the
handicraft sectors and those large firms that sought to develop in-house training.
First, the political features of the German state contributed to the emergence of sectoral
rather than national coordination. Political fragmentation – federalism and regionally-dominated
political parties – prevented the emergence of a dedicated national business party; employers
remained dispersed across parties, and no single manager of the bourgeoisie unified the corporate
voice. The party system – with its inadequate coverage of societal interests – meant that
bureaucrats and politicians lacked incentives to nurture a single peak association; instead, party
activists created dueling associations. The Central Association of German Employers was
developed by a leader of the Free Conservative Party, in conjunction with Bismarck and the Bund
der Industriellen was nurtured by the National Liberal Party’s Gustav Stresemann. Shortly before
the German revolution in 1918, business-oriented bureaucrats tried to unify employers into a peak
association, the Reich Association of German Industry (the RDI). But business associations
26
which in Germany from the early on were strongly differentiated in industrial and employers’
associations (Industrieverbände vs. Arbeitgeberverbände) continued to be distributed across
parties and divided politically along regional lines (such as the Democratic Party, the Catholic
Center Party, the German People’s Party and the German National People’s Party) (Turner, 1969,
58; Pollock, 1929, 861-78, Kocka, 1999, 42; Ritter). Party politics hampered the business-labor
effort to plan for postwar contingencies, made employers distrust the party system, and facilitated
the considerable infighting within the RDI over leadership and policy (Wolff-Rohe; Gatzke, 1954,
51). The absence of a single dedicated business party constrained the emergence of full-blown
macro-corporatism, and the Reich Association remained a rather loosely-knit peak association,
with real decision-making power was retained at the lower, sector level (Rogers and Dittmar,
1935, 483-4). Thus political structures reinforced the dominant, intra-industry economic
cleavage: the deep, regionally-based sectional divisions between heavy and light industry
(Herrigel 1997).
Second, the legacies of dueling multi-sector associations and the dominance of regional
coordination from the Nineteenth-Century meant that German employers were not able to evolve a
system of national self-regulation in the Twentieth-Century. Bureaucrats sympathetic to business
had incentives to nurture and to delegate authority to private corporatist channels of policymaking
after World War I, in order to stave off more radical parliamentary reforms. German
industrialists were on the defensive after the war and viewed corporatism as the means of regaining
some power (Maier, 1975, 15, 40-59). Bureaucrats feared the implied threat of social reform
through parliamentary processes (or even revolution!) and economic democracy was seen as an
alternative to socialism (Bunn, 1958, 284). Colonel Joseph Koeth, who had been head of the War
27
Office’s Raw Materials Section and became head of the Demobilization Office, sought to delegate
much of the policymaking associated with demobilization and economic regulation to business
and labor; to that end, he advocated that industrial committees should be allowed to regulate
themselves (Feldman, 1975; Maier, 1975, 62). Each industry was to integrate firms into an
association and all associations would belong to a national group that would (sometimes with
labor) engage in self-government. Extant employers’ associations were unified into the Reich
Association of German Industry (RDI), and Koeth left government to become one of the managers
of the new organization (Redlich, 1944, 321). But this system of self-regulation at the national
level never took off and Paul Silverberg (RDI leader) stated in 1922 that the Reich Association was
“nothing other than a really loose peak association, which can impose very few rules on its
members, branch associations and individual firms, can commit them to nothing, and in which
there is a lot of talking” (cited in Mierzejewski, 2002, 202).
Third, emerging industrial interests developed a strong need for a training system that
delivered industrial skills; yet the early history of vocational training in Germany reflected strong
intra-industry battles. After a mid-Nineteenth-Century break in the guilds’ control over
apprenticeships, the Crafts Trades Protection Act of 1897 established compulsory Chambers of
Trades as bodies for determining skills (Greinert, 2005, 40). The vesting of control over
apprenticeships in restored guilds was motivated by intense pressure from a craft trades lobby, a
cross-section of parties, and the authoritarian German state’s desire to prevent labor from gaining
control of skills (Thelen 2004, 53-4; Hansen, 1997).
Guilds-based vocational training system did not adequately meet the skills needs of
industrial firms and these cutting-edge technological sectors become leaders in the campaign for
28
training for industrial workers. In 1908 the Assn of German Engineers and the Assn of German
Machine-Building Firms formed the German Committee for Technical Education (DATSCH).
DATSCH worked for the next quarter century to develop certification and standardization of skills
within industry and to develop specific training course material appropriate to diverse trades
(Hansen, 1997, 595-9; Thelen, 2004, 55-61).3 The need for industrial skills also prompted the
expansion of technical, continuation and production schools, which began in the
Nineteenth-Century. The Association of German Engineers (VDI) sought the expansion of
technical middle schools and persuaded the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Industry to increase the
budget and to assume responsibility for these schools. Schools for the building trades also
expanded significantly and by 1911, Prussia had an elaborate network of schools (Greinert, 2005).
With the expansion of large firms in first decade of the 1900s, many companies also began
to develop skills in-house. Large industrial employers began creating firm-based programs for
training workers – either apprenticeships workshops or factory schools. But these large
employers could not grant certificates, as this was the prerogative of the chambers, and large firms
pushed for a parallel system of skills development, to be controlled by the Industry and Trade
Chambers (Thelen, 2004,55-61).
Fourth, in the 1920s bureaucrats attempted to create a national certificate system for
industrial skills with business and labor participation in oversight of firm-level training; however,
this failed to be legislated. The first world war augmented training gaps, in part because many
skilled workers lost their lives during the conflict and in part because fewer youths were seeking
apprenticeships – from two-thirds of males between 14 and 18 in 1907 to well below forty percent
3
But while DATSCH envisioned a collectivist solution, another association, the German Institute for technical work
training (DINTA), advanced greater freedom for individual firms in training and stressed the socialization of workers,
both concerns of large companies in heavy industry.
29
by 1917 (Hansen, 1997, 572-4). Moreover, worker unrest and Taylorism produced a big push for
a changes in the training of industrial workers (Greinert, 2005, 81). The postwar skills shortage
brought the ZAG (Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft)1 to propose an extensive vocational training
reform that would have created an oversight committee (with business and labor representation) to
manage the certification process. The Prussian Ministry of Trade also offered leadership in
pushing comprehensive national legislation for vocational training, and the ministries of labor and
economics joined the campaign to seek comprehensive legislation to apply to all sectors, regulate
youth training for all (i.e. beyond the apprentices), and to regulate the apprentice contract as a
public educational contract as well as a private employment contract. Legislation was introduced
in 1922 and 1923, which anticipated much of the eventual German system legislated in 1969.4
Yet, the Weimar efforts to create comprehensive vocational training systems ultimately
failed, in part, due to employers’ incapacities to reconcile their internal differences. The reform
measures were largely supported by DATSCH and the metal industry, which sought oversight
committees of business and labor associational representation to engage in industry-based
self-regulation, skills certification, standardization of training in both apprenticeships and
school-based instruction, occupational skills profiles and industry-controlled exams. But these
advanced sectors lost to a coalition of employers in heavy industry and small handicraft sectors
that defended the old system against the growing power of labor. The handicraft sectors did not
want to lose their source of cheap labor, so rejected the idea of industrial apprenticeships because
these firms could not pay the wages paid by larger firms. The large firms were fine with pursuing
1
The Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft was a bi-partite corporatist committee, founded in 1918. It was abolished in 1924.
This left the specific terms of certification to the industries involved, assigned responsibility for certification to the
chambers, specified exams, asked that firms have a coherent training plan, accorded the social partners oversight
functions in the self-regulation of training, set out rules to cover all youth workers (i.e. not only apprentices) and
investigated licensing.
4
30
segmentalist policies of training within the firm. Neither wanted to give organized labor power;
for example, the handicraft sectors feared that organized labor would deprive the small firms of
having a cheap source of labor (Thelen, 2004, 63-81). For example, at Ministry of Labor
hearings, both employers and unions supporting the concept of self-regulation; however, large
employers, represented in the Diet of German Industry and Commerce, resisted any limitations on
individual firms and resented state efforts to impose regulations. Moreover, the legislation came
at a moment of growing economic stagnation, and the Weimar initiatives undoubtedly suffered
from this inauspicious timing (Hansen, 1997, 585-593).
Thus the absence of a dedicated national business party to organize a single peak
employers’ association to stave off the threat of democratization during the heyday of industrial
developmental capitalism made it less likely for national business coordination to emerge in the
later era when the spirit of wartime coordination quickly faded away during the 1920s. Attempts
to create oversight committees of business and labor were thwarted by the special position of the
handicraft sectors in controlling apprenticeships and the way in which the handicraft sectors’
interests connect to employers’ history of fighting amongst themselves. Large firms’
segmentalist strategies to pursue coordination in the early 1900s reinforced their predilection for
internal firm-based training. The infighting between segments of capital made it more difficult
for German employers to develop channels for oversight of course content in schools and
sustained a preference for apprenticeships.
United States
Like Denmark and Germany, many employers from technically-advanced firms in the
United States sought to develop institutions for skills development in the workplace; however, the
31
American effort fell far short of the mark. The United States had a rather extensive system of
industrial schools in the Nineteenth-Century and American employers were very eager to obtain
portable, certified skills for their workers. This was a huge issue for American manufacturers,
especially before Fordism took off in the 1920s, and yet at the point that politics moved from a
regional focus to a national one, the industrial schools were not systematically institutionalized as
part of the emerging educational framework. Moreover, 85 percent of the largest industrial plants
were located in the Northeast in the early Twentieth-Century; therefore, it is surprising that these
manufacturing interests could not obtain their own stated goals.
The absence of vocational training in the United States reflects, in part, the political
features of the state and the very weak employers’ associations and unions. School boards rather
than social partners were responsible for proscribing the content of vocational education in the
United States and the absence of systematic input by the social partners worked against the
development of real qualifications. Moreover, in US, industry was unable to form an alliance
with labor to win a collective skills institution system, and lost to agricultural interests. The
structure of two-party competition discouraged the evolution of a highly-coordinated, peak
employers’ association and attendant channels of corporatist policymaking. Thus, a Danish-style
business-labor alliance and private channels for policy-making failed to develop in the US, despite
employers’ initial interest in securing much higher levels of coordination.
First, the structure of two-party, federal political competition in the United States worked
against the emergence of a strong, national, encompassing employers’ association to organize
firms in support of their collective interests. William McKinley ran for president in 1896 and
while he derived significant support from employers in the East and Midwest, industrialists in the
32
south and west were very reluctant to vote for the Republican Party after the Civil War and were
also loathed to join a party with African Americans members. The McKinley campaign together
with employer allies attempted to develop a national encompassing employer organization in the
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM, 1926; Gable, 1959), to bolster the campaign and to
serve as an agent for political nationalization around the Republican Party’s industrial
development policies. NAM’s initial policy positions reflected a vision of industrial cooperation
that resembled positions taken by employers across the pond: the association lobbied for a
department of commerce and – in true corporatist fashion – wanted to be licensed as the legitimate
spokesman for employers in business-government cooperative arrangements. But party politics –
dynamics of sectionally and locally dominated two-party competition – worked against the
realization of NAM’s corporatist aspirations. Congressional representatives from the South and
West voted against NAM’s legislative proposals (such as the formation of a department of
commerce and the granting of a national charter to the association) because they viewed these
policies as advantaging Eastern and Midwestern manufacturers (Martin, 2006).
Second, the failure of NAM to emerge as an organ for industrial self-regulation signaled a
setback for coordination in the United States. Left without its anticipated central role in
managing the transition to industrial capitalism, NAM started to wither away at the end of the
century and only gained new life when it reconstituted itself as an organization devoted to fighting
organized labor in 1903. This critical juncture signaled a setback for coordination in the
American political economy and strengthened the liberal impulse among US employers. This
turning point also made organized labor extremely suspicious about employers’ (and
33
especially NAM’s) interests in public policy, as organized business seemed so determined
to stifle the power of the working class.
Third, the 1890s and early 1900s constituted a moment of great enthusiasm for
developing for collective institutional mechanisms for the creation of vocational skills in
the United States as in other advanced industrial countries.
Many employers believed
that in order to be an industrial power, US industry required skills and workers with
“industrial intelligence,” and employers expressed considerable support for differentiating
the educational experience into two tracks, beginning with the sixth grade (Cohen,1968,
100).
Many managers became active in the “manual training movement,” to incorporate
practical skills in the educational content of public schools.
The National Association of
Manufacturers Committee on Industrial Education sought the creation of industrial schools
for blue-collar workers that followed the German model.
NAM 1902 report.
Diverse
interests were unified the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education (NSPIE),
created in 1906 to reconcile diverse opinions about the positioning of vocational education within
the larger school system. As part of its campaign for vocational training, the NSPIE sponsored a
multi-city tour for Georg Kerschensteiner to educate America about the German continuation
schools (“To Lecture on Education.”) The NSPIE wrote legislation for states such as
Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and New Jersey to create vocational education
possibilities for students within states, and pushed for federal financing of vocational training
within new continuation schools (“Plan to train the workers.”)
At the same time, the industrial movement was viewed with suspicion by the left,
and while industrial education could be portrayed as democratic, in that a unitary
34
education track benefitted only a small cross-section of students, John Dewey and others
feared that it would create a two-tiered educational system (Cohen, 1968, 108).
Professional school reformers, who favored folding vocational education into
comprehensive schools, were joined by organized labor. Thus, the American Federation of
Labor (AFL) sought a higher level of practical content in the schools, but favored
encompassing public schools with academic and vocational tracks rather than separate
vocational schools to avoid two-tiered systems (Greinert, 2005, 82-87).
Fourth, the wave of support for vocational education crested with the legislation of
the Smith-Hughes Act in 1917, which created a national mandate for vocational education,
federal funds to the states to support part-time and full-time vocational education, and a
Federal Board of Vocational Education to oversee adventures in pushing this model.
However, individual states were accorded the right to determine the form of vocational
education – in particular, whether schools would remain separate or be incorporated into
the mainstream, and a small minority of states moved to the dual track (Kliebard; Benavot
1983; Kantor and Tyack, 1982).
Manufacturing accounted for a much larger percentage of GDP than agriculture by 1920,
and Northeastern manufacturing accounted for an overwhelmingly large share of the total GDP.
Yet fifty percent of Smith-Hughes funds went for agricultural workers (with only forty percent for
industrial workers), and the states had very different interests in the degree to which the act
developed specific, certifiable skills. Southern elite agricultural interests were dead set against
any national initiative to develop portable, certifiable skills for southern African-American
plantation workers and northern industrial interests ran up against the stone-walling techniques of
35
southern agrarian elites. These southern agricultural elites won because they were represented by
southern Democrats, who held key Congressional chairs responsible for reporting out legislation,
and the concept of states rights was used to strike down amendments permitting the evolution of a
more viable skills-training policy (Werum, 1997, 400-404, 414; Margo, 1990). Thus, while
employers wanted a collective training system that provided real certified, portable skills, they
were opposed by agricultural elites. The dynamics of two party competition and the structure of
the US Congress worked against employers realizing their ambitions.
After the passage of the Smith-Hughs Act, only 8 states moved to form vocational schools;
moreover, the absence of highly-organized institutions for coordination between business and
worked to dampen the social partners’ input into the content of school-based instruction.
Consequently, a system of school-based courses tailored to certified skills failed to emerge.
Finally, the High School Act of 1926 incorporated vocational training back into the mainstream
education system, and the era of experimentation with a separate track for vocational training came
to an end.
CONCLUSION
At the dawn of the Twentieth-Century, industrial employers began to articulate an interest
in vocational training and sought a high level of business control over the process, a separation of
the vocational and academic education tracks at the secondary level, and accreditation of skills that
closely fit with employers’ needs. Yet even collectivist countries began to diverge at this point
when less-skilled industrial workers became a bigger part of the labor force. For example, Danish
employers’ and labor organization quite quickly obtained the delegation of authority for
self-regulation; moreover, Danish employers sought extensive use of school-based instruction for
36
less-skilled industrial workers, rather than apprenticeships, because the emerging industrial sectors
wanted to skill semi-skilled workers and the apprenticeship programs were inadequate to this task
(Boje and Fink, 1990). In Germany, control over skills training remained vested in the old
handicraft sectors and, increasingly, in individual firms.
I have rooted this divergence in the variations in peak encompassing employers’
associations, which, in turn, reflect profound differences in the political features of the state. The
Danish encompassing peak associations unified a broad cross-section of business and enabled
employers and labor to collaborate, to secure self-regulation, and to protect their jurisdictional
autonomy over industrial relations against the intervention of agricultural interests and the state.
Consequently, Denmark gave occupational committees formal power over oversight of vocational
training much earlier than in Germany; this, in turn, allowed for the emergence of industry-specific
skills, greater monitoring of school-based course content, and a greater reliance on schools as
opposed to firms to provide training. In Germany, where employers in this multi-party, federal
system were distributed across (regionally-strong) political parties and dueling peak associations,
an intra-business split was much more pronounced. In the advent of the postwar revolution and
democratization, the weak party system motivated right-oriented politicians and bureaucrats to
delegate policy-making authority over industrial relations to industry-level associations and this
made it much more difficult to get agreement on a national framework for public policies such as
vocational training. In the American federal, two-party system, elites were also regionally
divided across the two parties, with industrial employers dominating the Republican northeast,
rich agricultural interests controlling the southern Democratic party, and labor lacking a partisan
37
home. In this case, the dominant cleavage was between industry and agriculture, and vocational
training reflected the very divergent needs of these two groups.
This argument has important implications for problems perplexing students of vocational
training systems. First, it contributes to the important work done on the impact of preindustrial
skills on modern vocational training. While guilds clearly had an enormous impact on the forms
of apprenticeships and the tradition of non-wage competition among employers, I suggest that the
school part of the dual system (its integration with apprenticeship learning and capacity to offer
certifiable skills) was strongly influenced by the political features of the state and consequent
forms of employers’ associations.
Second, this argument helps to explain why the ambition to control labor radicalism
resulted in such different strategies in Denmark and Germany. Both vesting control over skills in
the handicraft chambers and according control to corporatist committees may be viewed as a
defense against democratizing reforms, and the structure of political competition had a big impact
on the strategy pursued by the right. In Germany, the right sought to control labor. This was not
only achieved by the early development of welfare institutions but also by vesting control over
skills in the new handicraft chambers. In Denmark, while control was initially given to the
restored guilds, reformers then sought to limit democratizing reforms and a possible coalition by
the center-left (or farmers/labor) by moving policy-making to corporatist committees, because the
right thought it had less to lose in these channels than in battles with agriculture and farmers in
parliamentary channels.
Third, the argument has important ramifications for our understanding of the divergent
tracks of dualism versus solidarity today. Patterns of coordination among the social partners have
38
an impact on training systems flexibility and capacities for adjustment, and in particular on the
extent to which skills production can be adjusted to economic transformations and tailored to
diverse regional needs. More encompassing employers’ associations are more likely to unite
manufacturing and services sectors, to reconcile the diverse needs of sectors in achieving an
overarching framework for vocational training, to aid in the movement of workers from declining
into emerging sectors, and to help to renegotiate collective business identities during moments of
economic and generational transformation.
One might wonder why Denmark and Germany have diverged in modern time in their
capacities to improve the skills and employment status of the long-term unemployed during a
period in which the rise of post-industrial manufacturing has threatened the work contributions of
low-skilled industrial workers (Martin and Thelen ,2007). This paper suggests that Denmark, to
some extent, set the stage for these solidaristic policies a century before, with its resolutions to
battles over industrial relations and vocational training at the beginning of the century.
Denmark’s greater reliance on schools to train workers at all skills levels – not only highly-skilled
apprenticeships – left a legacy of attention to the skills needs of all manual workers and this, in
turn, helped the country to avoid the insider-outsider dynamics separating German workers.
39
APPENDIX:
TABLE 1: VARIATIONS IN VOCATIONAL TRAINING SYSTEMS
State Commitment
Low
Non-certified,
non-portable skills
State Commitment
High
Certified, portable skills
Firm Involvement Low
Firm Involvement High
Schools dominant institutions
apprenticeships play a
supplementary role
Apprenticeships dominant
schools play a supplementary
role
Great Britain, United States
Japan
general skills/education
some in-firm practical training
few apprenticeships
segmentalist system
France, Sweden
Germany
Schools are dominant
some apprenticeships for
highly-skilled workers
Dual system of schools and
apprenticeships
Denmark
40
TABLE 2: KEY ACTS IN VOCATIONAL TRAINING
Year
Denmark
Germany
1850
1857 act on freedom of trade
deprived guilds of rights
Trade and Industry Code of
1869 deprived guilds of rights
1880 to
1899
Apprenticeship Act of 1889
reintroduced contracts between
masters and apprentices.
Employers had to send
apprentices to schools,
attendance compulsory.
Technical School Association
set up in 1891, syllabi, texts
Crafts Trade Protection Act of
1897 to restore traditional
control of apprenticeships by
guilds
1900 to
1929
1921 Apprenticeship Act
employers’ assns and unions
in individual trades could ask
Minister for Education to hold
apprentices’ examinations
critical for tripartite cooperation
training
in 1920s first occupational
committees formed
Failure to pass legislation
proposed in the 1920s
1930 to
1949
1937 Apprenticeship Act made
trade committees statutory
umbrella apprenticeship
coordinating council
compulsory education for
apprentices
Nazi initiatives
1950 to
1970
1956 Apprenticeship Act
abolished restrictions on
numbers of apprenticeships to
curb high youth unemployment.
Classes shifted from evenings to
days with stronger education
requirements, trade committees
helped develop curricula.
Vocational Training Act of 1969
United States
Smith-Hughes Act in 1917
High School Act of 1926
* Data source: Cort and Hansen, 2002, 44-45.
41
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