A Berlin chimney sweep: does Germany’s success lie in “the very fact that labour is still supported by structures that are frankly medieval”? (© John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images)
Strange things happen when Lutz-Matthias Peters walks the streets of Hamburg. Some people stop, spit over their shoulder or twist the buttons on their jackets. Others shake his hand. Peters wears black leather trousers, a black double-breasted jacket with golden buttons, a cravat and a battered top hat in which he keeps his business cards and a notepad—his mobile office, as he calls it. On the buckle of his belt is an engraving of Saint Florian, patron saint of firefighters. He is what German compound nouns allow you to call a Schornsteinfegermeister, a master chimney sweep. He looks the part.
In Europe, chimney sweeps have been associated with good fortune since medieval times, but could they have a modern significance too? They epitomise a workforce structure that is unique to Germany, and this has led some to wonder whether the system might be transplanted to other countries. They include Ed Miliband, whose advisors, such as Stewart Wood, have taken a close interest in the German labour market system and have mulled the possibility of bringing it to Britain. Could it be done? And would it be any help?
Germans are certainly fond of their chimney sweeps—they are so revered that plastic mini-sweeps—sometimes riding a pig or brandishing a horseshoe and four-leaf clover—are popular table decorations on New Year’s Eve. Chimney sweeps like Lutz-Matthias Peters are still legally obliged to pay a biannual visit to each property in their allocated district, to clean fireplaces, inspect the heating system and pull the odd dead bird out of the chimney (in 2005, five out of 80m people living in Germany died of carbon monoxide poisoning; in France it was 400 out of 60m). To some in Germany they represent an old-fashioned, irrelevant tradition. To others chimney sweeps sum up everything that has turned the country into an economic powerhouse.
Roman Veit is not a fan of Germany’s men in black and the reputation that surrounds them. He too is a chimney sweep, but he refuses to wear the uniform. When we meet in a Greek restaurant on the outskirts of Berlin he is wearing black jeans and a black sweatshirt imprinted with the words Freier Schornsteinfeger, “freelance chimney sweep.” His colleagues, he says, are a “folk costume club” that exploits its privileged status to rip off customers.
Chimney sweeps, he argues, enjoy special privileges that cannot be justified in the modern marketplace. Not only are they empowered to enter properties whether the owner likes it or not, they also don’t have to worry about their income: their wages are set by the state and only certified chimney sweeps are allowed to practise. And these days they don’t have much roaming to do either: each chimney sweep is allocated a district that includes somewhere between 900 and 2,300 properties.
His colleagues regard Veit as a bit of rogue agent, since he practises in Berlin but is officially certified through a master in Austria. Not a week passes without legal threats from other chimney sweeps who accuse him of being a “black-market chimney sweep.” “The Germans always claim they are good Europeans,” he says, “but in practice they don’t like the idea of competing with other Europeans one bit.” While Polish plumbers or Czech carpenters have been able to offer their services across Germany for some time, chimney sweeping is still generally a closed shop. His colleagues, Veit says, are “worse than the mafia.”
Veit is not alone: there are dozens of websites telling the tales of chimney-sweep martyrs like octogenarian Harry Hollmann from Oldenburg, who in 2006 refused to open his doors and ended up handcuffed against the wall by the police while the sweep got on with his state-mandated job. Some of them point out that chimney sweeps gained their protected status during the Third Reich, after Himmler issued a new law in 1937. A faulty fireplace was a convenient excuse for breaking down the doors of dissidents.
The privileges of German chimney sweeps have also been a thorn in the European Union’s side. In April 2003, the EU started proceedings against the country at the heart of European integration for violating labour laws. After trying to ignore the call from Brussels, even politicians from the German centre-left eventually recognised something had to change. The Social Democrats’ candidate for chancellor Peer Steinbrück, who will compete against Merkel in the federal elections in September, complained in April 2004 that he wasn’t allowed to choose his own chimney sweep: “Everyone’s calling for less regulation and bureaucracy. But when it comes to applying those ideas everyone’s suddenly got a dozen reasons to hand why they can’t supposedly be applied to them.”
As of 1st January, the chimney sweep monopoly has come to an end. Homeowners still have to open their doors to the man or woman in black, but they can choose a different chimney sweep if they want to. Freelancers such as Veit have been popping up ever since. “True luck is being able to choose your own chimney sweep” is the slogan on the leaflet he hands me. He promises a 30 per cent reduction in rates (roughly €90 per visit, as opposed to €120), flexible working hours and country-wide availability.
“In Germany people are finally waking up to the fact that so-called ‘experts’ have been conning them for years,” he says, and points to the rise of the Pirate Party, which has entered regional parliaments in Berlin, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein since 2011 (and which has performed modestly in recent polls). Is he a Pirate? No, he says. But someone recently called him “the Robin Hood of chimney sweeps, fighting for the customer,” and he is fond of that description.
Over the course of the eurozone crisis, a certain narrative about the secret of Germany’s economic success has developed. Unlike its southern European neighbours, the story goes, Germany has “done its homework,” as German politicians often put it in rather patronising terms: its latest economic miracle is due to the painful supply-side reforms and labour law liberalisations of the early noughties, such as the controversial Hartz IV reforms of the Schröder government. German politicians have been pushing for similar reforms in crisis hit countries such as Greece, where the licensed taxi drivers of Athens became a popular bogey man with German tabloids when they went on strike against the liberalisation of their trade.
But a growing chorus of economists and sociologists are pointing out a flaw in that tale. What if Germany’s success isn’t due to the “modernisation” of its work places at all, but lies in the very fact that labour is still supported by structures that are frankly medieval, such as those of the chimney sweeps? Wolfgang Streeck, the managing director of Cologne’s influential Max Planck Institute, is one of them: “The monopoly of Germany’s chimney sweeps isn’t ridiculous at all,” he says. “The only thing that is ridiculous are those politicians who felt the need to attack it to show off their neoliberal credentials.”
Much has been made in the British press of Germany’s family-run manufacturing businesses: over the last few years, “Mittelstand,” meaning small or medium-sized businesses, has joined “Kindergarten” and “schadenfreude” in the repertoire of German words used in English speech. Germany’s 3.5m Mittelstand companies represent 52 per cent of the country’s total economic output, 61 per cent of employment and €200bn of exports. Of them, 1,300 are regarded as world market leaders in their niche, compared to only 67 in the UK. Now Britain, France and Spain want to have a Mittelstand too.
What those countries miss is that the Mittelstand relies on a system of training: the unfashionable and underestimated Handwerk, or skilled crafts. Most of these Handwerk trades are organised through guild-like structures. For example, whereas anyone can start a carpentry business in Britain, you’d need to become a master carpenter first to do so in Germany: an apprenticeship of at least three years followed by months of evening classes and weekend seminars. Chimney sweeping is essentially a service industry with the added privileges of Handwerk. Many of these trades still use traditional uniforms—if you drive through Germany, there’s a good chance you’ll pass a man or woman in flared corduroy overalls, a wide-brimmed hat on their head and a bundle flung over their shoulders: journeymen on their wandering years, roaming the land in search for employment by a master of their trade.
If this sounds exotic, it just illustrates how different the German labour market is. In Britain, the closest comparison you could find would be a London black cab driver: a profession regulated by a guild (the Worshipful Company of Hackney Carriage Drivers), which requires a long apprenticeship (34 months) culminating in a fiendishly difficult exam (“The Knowledge”). That the most profitable parts of the German economy are effectively run by London cabbie-types is largely due to historical accident. As in Britain, many of the trade guilds were disempowered or smashed completely over the course of the early 19th century. But guild-like structures never really went away: the chimney sweeping Innung (guild) was abolished in 1864, but duly popped up again in 1878—it trains and licenses sweeps to this day.
Stewart Wood, a Labour Minister without Portfolio and one of Ed Miliband’s closest advisors, is a specialist in the uniquely eccentric logic of the German labour market. He too thinks that Germany’s success is less due to the modernity of the Hartz IV reforms than to the traditional values of Rhineland capitalism. In his contribution to Peter Hall and David Soskice’s influential 2001 book, Varieties of Capitalism, he points out that if the 1980s in Britain were a decade of unprecedented neoliberal reforms driven by a powerful central government, in West Germany they were a period in which reform impulses were frustrated again and again. Kohl swept to power with the slogan “less state, more freedom,” but when reunification came the role of the trade unions was as secure as it had been 10 years beforehand.
The Schornsteinfegermeister may go the same way. Peters is surprisingly relaxed about his new freelance rivals—they “don’t have a chance of survival,” he says. They may be able to push down the price at first, but eventually costs of promotion, training and recruitment will come back to hit the customer. When I asked Veit how he will pay for the petrol when cleaning a chimney in Munich in the south one day and in Kiel in the north the next, he shrugs, and murmurs about plans to start a “franchise” with 50 or so others, though he admits he has been struggling to find partners because he doesn’t know if they are good enough. A system similar to the one already in place may be the logical outcome.
The biggest challenge for free agents like Veit will be training up new sweeps. Sooty breeches aren’t sexy and recruiting young people is already a struggle for the traditionalists. Peters says he has to approach people at apprenticeship fairs and get them excited—they don’t come to him. Professional pride is all he can offer them, which is why his outfit is so important: if a national economy decides that it wants to preserve certain specialist skills, silly costumes may just have to be part of it. “Imagine, for argument’s sake, that you are a government and you want your country to lead the field in Byzantine naval history,” Wolfgang Streeck says. “The only way you are going to achieve that is by guaranteeing a student a job at the end of their five-year PhD in the subject. You cannot simply rely on the market.”
For the state, on the other hand, apprenticeships can pay off: German Industry UK, a body promoting German industry in Britain, has calculated that 1.8m young people in state-sponsored apprenticeships in Germany cost less than 400,000 young people in business apprenticeship schemes in the UK. With 67 per cent of its younger population locked into long-term apprenticeships, Germany will always be slow to enter new markets, but it has also meant that the Europe-wide recession barely dented unemployment figures. And having strong guild-like bodies like the chimney sweeping Innung means that during a recession politicians can enter negotiations without being accused of pandering either to business or unions.
Can you copy a system like Germany’s and paste it into Britain? One civil servant I spoke to was fed up with hearing praise heaped upon “the German model”: we’ve had upskilling in Britain since 1700, he pointed out, just not exclusively in manufacturing. But Ed Miliband has surrounded himself with advisors and academics who are interested in whether Britain’s economic structure can be more Germanic. “The question of whether we can have a more responsible capitalism is a mainstream debate now,” Wood says. The Conservative Skills Minister Matthew Hancock says that British businesses need to get better at offering vocational training as an alternative to university degrees: “For decades, Britain has been held back by artificial and counter-productive divisions between practical and academic learning, allowing countries such as Germany to get ahead in the global race for technical excellence.” We need less “education, education, education” and more businesses who take responsibility for training employees—that’s one thing everyone seems to agree on. The lesson from Germany’s chimney sweeps is that Britain may have to risk looking ridiculously unfashionable in order to progress into the future.
Can Miliband wait 130 years? asks Oliver Grant
Ed Miliband and his advisors are following a well-trodden path in their attempt to emulate the German system of technical and vocational education: this has been an obsession of British policy makers for 140 years (there was a report in 1872 by a commission headed by the Duke of Devonshire). It should be fairly clear by now that a direct transfer of the system is never going to happen. The German approach is a unique historical bargain, not easily replicated.
It is also unclear whether improvements in technical and vocational education can ever lead a manufacturing revival as the Labour leader’s advisors hope. Does Germany have a successful manufacturing sector because of its strong vocational education system, or isn’t it rather the case that the success of German manufacturing has created a demand for skilled workers which its vocational training system exists to supply? The willingness of young people in Germany to take up relatively low-paid industrial apprenticeships is heavily influenced by the fact that the jobs which they then obtain on completion have proven in the past to be secure and well paid. Success has bred success.
However a closer historical examination of the German example shows that investments in technical education can indeed cause industries to rise and locate in areas where these improvements are made, but the lags are so long that this is unlikely to interest politicians of any party. The German system has its origins in a reform process which began in southern Germany in the 1830s. This sought to build on the apprenticeship system and to transform it into something suitable for an industrial economy.
The initial response of the north Germans was one of massive condescension. Southern Germany was then relatively backward, lacking coal and other mineral resources, and the Protestant northerners regarded the inhabitants as a bunch of alcohol-soaked, priest-ridden layabouts. They predicted that all this effort would just produce a lot of unemployed engineers. And for a long time they seemed to be right. But in the 1890s, southern Germany’s Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) produced the likes of Bosch, Diesel, Daimler, Benz and others, and the industries these gentlemen started have made southern Germany the richest part of Europe (post 1945).
So we have a lag of 130 years between the institutional reforms of the 1830s and the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s and 1960s. A bit slow for Ed Miliband, I fear.
Charles Grant is a research fellow at the European Studies Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford
