Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle by David Meskill (review)

This book focuses on the German Labor Administration, an office that controlled employment placement and vocational training and that enjoyed a high degree of autonomy through six different regimes in the twentieth century. This autonomy is curious, given the divergent ideologies and goals of those regimes. In fact, it functioned so quietly that historians have taken little note of it, which perhaps makes it merit their attention all the more. As David Meskill shows, this autonomy had a great deal to do with the fact that the Labor Administration’s function was well suited to each regime’s labor needs, which gave each regime little reason to intrude.

Meskill posits a shifting labor-management relationship within Germany that responded over the years to perceived economic needs. The Kaiserreich economy was still building a skilled workforce in the throes of maturing industrialization, and industrial leaders hoped to preempt potential socialist tendencies of workers. By providing workers with those skills and industry with skilled workers, the Labor Administration fulfilled both needs. With World War I, however, government and industry became more interested in efficient mobilization than stabilization, and it took very little for the Labor Administration to retool itself to achieve this goal. Industry subsequently focused on Americanization and the systematization of the labor force in the 1920s; this involved the heightened standardization of labor skills, as well as further expansion of vocational training and certification. The Administration served these needs well, even in the Third Reich.

The Labor Administration remained useful in the postwar Federal Republic, providing initially for “an orderly domestic market” (228) to help West Germany recover economically. But the sheer strength of German recovery and the high demand for vocationally trained labor prompted employers to bypass the Labor Administration and begin to look for and train labor on their own. With a mature workforce in place that was no longer potentially tempted by socialism, with skills standardization and certification, and with the resolution of security issues by the Atlantic alliance, which removed military mobilization as an issue, the Administration no longer had an obvious function. Indeed, Meskill argues, “the heady sense of individual opportunity” (229) on the part of these now middle-class, unproletarian workers in the 1950s prompted both workers and employers to bypass the Administration and deal directly with each other. It was not long before the Federal Republic would abolish it. Labor Administration would formally assume smaller, more specialized roles (e.g., assisting with job placement for the physically handicapped) in 1961. In short, it ceased to exist because it had met national needs so well that it had made itself obsolete.

Meskill pursues another continuity through the decades: the cohesion among the administrators themselves, their administrative independence, and the culture that held them in such high regard. The twentieth century had been an “age of organization” (225), a period in which a belief prevailed that neutral specialists could resolve social and economic issues better than the private sector could. Such an attitude contributed to the Administration’s successful defense of its autonomy, Meskill argues, even during the Third Reich. But, Meskill continues, “organization” itself as a means of resolving issues was no longer as attractive after the war. Forty years of bureaucratic performance in this area had made people less enamored of top-down solutions and less awed of bureaucratic authority. This made both individuals and employers more willing to bypass the Administration.

For Meskill, the dismantling of the Administration was another stage in German “democratization”—not in the sense that Labor Administration officials were now elected, but rather that a unilateral relationship between bureaucrats and citizens had disappeared. This is plausible, especially in a country where a tradition of strong bureaucracy (and bureaucratic solutions to social problems) extended back to eighteenth-century Prussia. Comparative studies involving France or Sweden, for example, might nevertheless show that the relationship between an “age of organization” and democratic...