Optimizing the German Workforce

During the twentieth century, German government and industry created a highly skilled workforce as part of an ambitious program to control and develop the country s human resources. Yet, these long-standing efforts to match as many workers as possible to skilled vocations and to establish a system of job training have received little scholarly attention, until now. The author s account of the broad support for this program challenges the standard historical accounts that focus on disagreements over the German political-economic order and points instead to an important area of consensus. These advances are explained in terms of political policies of corporatist compromise and national security as well as industry s evolving production strategies. By tracing the development of these policies over the course of a century, the author also suggests important continuities in Germany s domestic politics, even across such different regimes as Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, and post-1945 West Germany.