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

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coalition 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

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authority, as they hoped to win outright electoral majorities (Martin and Swank, 2008, 2011).

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

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sectoral coordination – were more likely to retain a role for the state through social partnerships

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

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followed earlier patterns established in industrial relations and eased the social partners’ effort to

control certification and 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

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have a limited involvement of both firms and state, statist nations have a low level of firm

involvement 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

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while the firm-based specific assets of Germany have about 300 different categories of

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

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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

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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

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producing dedicated national business parties, because sectional divisions remain salient. While

politicians on the right may 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.

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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

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

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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.

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

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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;

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

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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 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

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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 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

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development of a skills-based export sector (Galenson 1952; Unwin, 1966; Thelen, 2004;

Cusack, Iversen, and Soskice, 2007; Hall and Soskice 2001).

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

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democratic parties demonstrated much stronger support for low-skilled workers than Christian

Democratic parties (Iversen).

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

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content of vocational education, industry was able to form an alliance with labor to win a

collective 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’

11 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.

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Federation of 1896, both for its own electoral ambitions and to delegate considerable policy-

making power to the 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

20

control over apprenticeship exams and contracts, resulting in a decline of apprenticeship exams,

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

21

from 1890 to 1920 was something of 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

22

further steps 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

22 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

fashion, without oversight and with no formal integration of practical training and technical

education. Schools became increasingly differentiated with technological change; for example,

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

24

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.) 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

25

bodies; moreover, educational choices were largely determined by Lander for many years and

significant unevenness characterizes the German system (Smart, 1975, 153).

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

26

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 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

27

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 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).

28

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

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;

33 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

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 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 1 The Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft was a bi-partite corporatist committee, founded in 1918. It was abolished in 1924. 44 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.

30

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 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

31

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 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

32

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 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

33

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 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

34

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 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

35

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 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

36

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 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

37

dominating the Republican northeast, rich agricultural interests controlling the southern

Democratic party, and labor lacking a partisan 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.

38

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 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.

APPENDIX:

39

TABLE 1: VARIATIONS IN VOCATIONAL TRAINING SYSTEMS

Firm Involvement Low

Schools dominant institutions apprenticeships play a supplementary role

Firm Involvement High

Apprenticeships dominant schools play a supplementary role

State Commitment Low

Non-certified, non-portable skills

Great Britain, United States

general skills/educationsome in-firm practical trainingfew apprenticeships

Japan

segmentalist system

State Commitment High

Certified, portable skills

France, Sweden

Schools are dominantsome apprenticeships for highly-skilled workers

Germany

Dual system of schools and apprenticeships

Denmark

TABLE 2: KEY ACTS IN VOCATIONAL TRAINING

40

Year Denmark Germany United States

1850 1857 act on freedom of tradedeprived 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 unionsin individual trades could ask Minister for Education to hold apprentices’ examinationscritical for tripartite cooperation training in 1920s first occupationalcommittees formed

Failure to pass legislation proposed in the 1920s

Smith-Hughes Act in 1917

High School Act of 1926

1930 to1949

1937 Apprenticeship Act made trade committees statutory umbrella apprenticeship coordinating council compulsory education for apprentices

Nazi initiatives

1950 to1970

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

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