VOCATIONAL TRAINING AND THE ORIGINS OF COORDINATION
SPECIFIC SKILLS AND THE POLITICS OF COLLECTIVE ACTION
By Cathie Jo Martin
Boston University
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
1
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
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
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
6
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
7
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
10
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.
11
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
12
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
13
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
14
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
15
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
16
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
17
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
18
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.
19
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
* Data source: Cort and Hansen, 2002, 44-45. BIBLIOGRAPHY
41
Arbejdsgiveren. 1921. “Lærlingeloven.” Arbejdsgiveren 22 (16 22 Avril): 124-5.
Arbejdsgiveren. 1921. “I Ugens Løb.” Arbejdsgiveren 22 (19 13 Maj): 155.
Arbejdsgiveren. 1921. “Lærlingeforholdet.” Arbejdsgiveren 22 (43 28 Oktober): 351-2.
Arbejdsgiveren. 1937. “Lærlingeloven.” Arbejdsgiveren 38 (23 12 November): 369-72.
Arbejdsgiveren. 1937. “Lærlingeloven.” Arbejdsgiveren 38 (24 26 November): 385- 90.
Benavot, Aaron. 1983. “The Rise and Decline of Vocational Education.” Sociology of Education. 56 (2 April): 63-76.
Bensel, Richard. 2000. The political economy of American industrialization. NY: Cambridge University Press.
Boje, Per and Fink, Jørgen. 1990. “Mesterlære og teknisk udannelse I Danmark 1850-1950.” Erhvervshistorisk Årbog (Aarhus: Erhvervsarkivet).
Boje, Per, Ditte Reinholdt Hansen, Søren Toft Hansen, Peter Kjær, Peer Hull Kristensen, Marianne Rostgaard, Michael F. Wagner. 2000. Lederskab i Dansk Industri og samfund 1880 - 1960. Aalborg, Denmark: Aalborg Universitetsforlag.
Bruun, Henry (1931), ”Arbejdsgiverforeninger i Danmark i AArene 1862-1898.” in Povl Engelstoft og Hans Jensen, eds., Bidrag til Arbejderklassens og Arbejderspørgsmaalets Historie i Danmark fra 1864 til 1900, København: Gyldendalske Boghandel. Nordisk Forlag, 352-409.
Busemeyer, Marius. 2009. “Asset specificity, institutional complementarities and the variety of skill regimes in coordinated market economies.” Socio-Economic Review 7: 375–406.
Clark, Linda and Christopher Winch. 2007. “Introduction.” in Clark and Winch eds. Vocational Education, International Approaches, Developments and Systems (London: Routledge): 1-17.
Cohen, Sol: 1968. “The Industrial Education Movement, 1906-17.” American Quarterly 20 (1 Spring): 95-110.
Cort, Pia and Hansen. 2002. Vocational Education and Training in Denmark. Luxembourg: CEDEFOP.
Culpepper, Pepper. 2007. “Small States and Skill Specificity.” Comparative Political Studies 40 (6 June): 611-637.
42
Cusack, Thomas, Torben Iversen and David Soskice. 2007 “Economic Interests and the Origins of Electoral Institutions.” American Political Science Review 101 (August).Cusack, Thomas, Iverson, Torben and Soskice, David (2007) “Economic Interests and the Origins of Electoral Systems”, American Political Science Review 101(3): 373-91.
DA – Korrespondance, General udgånde 1896 6 30 til 1899 9 21, Erhvervsarkivet, Aarhus, DK
Dunleavy, Colleen and Thomas Welskopp. 2007. “Peculiarities and Myths: Comparing U.S. and German Capitalism,” German Historical Institute Bulletin no. 41 (Fall 2007): 33-64.
Estevez-Abe, Margarita, Torben Iversen, and David Soskice. 2001. “Social Protection and the Formation of Skills” in Hall and Soskice ed. Varieties of Capitalism. Galenson, Walter. 1952. The Danish System of Labor Relations. A Study in Industrial Peace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hall, Peter and David Soskice eds. 2001. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hannah, Leslie. “Logistics, market size and giant plants in the early 20th century: a global view.” Tokyo University.
Hansen, Hal. 1997. Caps and Gowns. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin dissertation.
Herrigel, Gary. 1996. Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Iversen, Torben and Stephens, John D. (2008) “Partisan Politics, the Welfare State, and Three Worlds of Human Capital Formation”, Comparative Political Studies 41(4-5): 600-37.
Greinert, Wold-Dietrich. 2005. Mass Vocational Education and Training in Europe. Luxembourg: CEDEFOP.
Juul, Ida. 2009. Fra lavsvæsen til fagligt selvstyre. Arbejdsgivelserne indflydelse på erhvervsuddannelserne i perioden 1857-1937.” Økonomi & Politik 82 (3): 3-14.
Juul, Ida. (2005). På sporet af erhvervspædagogikken. The Danish University of Education, Copenhagen.
Kantor and Tyack. 1982. Work, Youth and Schooling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kinghorn, Janice Rye and John Vincent Nye. 1996. “The Scale of Production in Western Europe: A Comparison of the Official Industry Statistics in the United States, Britain, France and Germany, 1905-1913.” The Journal of Economic History 56 (1 Mar): 90-112.
43
Kitschelt, Herbert. 1993. “Class Structure and Social Democratic Party Strategy.” British Journal of Political Science 23 (3 July): 299-337.
Koudahl, P. (2006). Den gode erhvervsuddannelse? Roskilde Universitet, Roskilde. Aalborg: Institut for kommunikation, Aalborg Universitet.
Kristensen, Peer Hull and Peter Kjær. 2000. “The Craft Origins of Modern Management.” in Haldor Byrkjeflot et al. eds, The Democratic Challenge to Capitalism. Management and Democracy in the Nordic Countries. Bergen, Norway: Fakbokforlaget.
Kristensen, Peer Hull and Charles Sabel. 1997. “The Small-Holder Economy in Denmark.” Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin eds. World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization. New York: Cambridge University Press: 344-378.
Van Kersbergen, Kess and Manow, Philip eds. 2009. Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Margo, Robert. 1990. Race and Schooling in the South. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, Cathie Jo. 2004. “Reinventing Welfare Regimes.” World Politics 57 (1 October): 39-69.
Martin, Cathie Jo and Duane Swank. 2008. “The Political Origins of Coordinated Capitalism.” American Political Science Review 101 (3 May).
Martin, Cathie Jo and Kathleen Thelen. 2007. “The State and Coordinated Capitalism.” World Politics 60 (October).
Nielsen, Søren and Pia Cort. 1999. Vocational education and training in Denmark. (Greece: Thessaloniki: Cedefop — European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training ).
“Plan to train the workers.” New York Times (April 19, 1914): xx12.
Rothstein, Bo. 1988. “State and Capital in Sweden.” Scandinavian Political Studies 11 (3): 235-260.
Smart, Kenneth. 1975. “Vocational Education in the Federal Republic of Germany.” Comparative Education 11 (2 June): 153-163.
Swank, Duane and Cathie Jo Martin. 2009. “The Political Foundations of Redistribution and Equality in Postindustrial Capitalist Democracies,” presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Toronto, Canada (September 3-5, 2009).
44
Søgaard, Helga. 1954. “ Rasmus Berg: Minder fra Haandværk og Industri.” (Universitetsforlaget i Aarhus): 141.
Thelen, Kathleen. 2004. How Institutions Evolve. New York: Cambridge University Press. “To Lecture on Education.” New York Times (October 29, 1910): 18.
Trampusch, Christine. 2010. “Co-evolution of Skills and Welfare in Coordinated Market Economies? A Comparative Historical Analysis of Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland”, European Journal of Industrial Relations 16(3): 197-220.
Vigen, Anders. 1946. Arbejdsgiver Foreningen Gennem 50 Aar, Copenhagen: Langkjærs Bogtrykkeri.
Werum, Regina. 1997. “Sectionalism and Racial Politics: Federal Vocational Policies and Programs in the Predesegregation South.” Social Science History 21 (3 Autumn): 399-453.
MISSING REFERENCES in the list which are quoted n the main text:
Agerholm/Vigen 1921Amorin/Cox 1997Bunn, 1958Coleman 1987Dansk Arbejdsgiverforening, 1946Downs 1957Due et al. 1994Due/MadsenFeldman, 1975; FinkGable, 1959Gatzke, 1954, 51Hannah, no dateHawley 1966IversenIversen/Soskice 2009Kliebard; Kocka, 1999,Maier, 1975Maier, 1975Martin/Swank 2004Martin/Swank 2006Martin/Swank 2009Martin/Swank 2011
45
Mierzejewski, 2002NAM, 1926; Noorgard PedersenPollock, 1929,Redlich, 1944RitterRogers and Dittmar, 1935Turner, 1969Unwin 2966Wolff-Rohe
46