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BusinessWeek: January 11, 1993 |
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Books
SKILLS BLITZ JUGGERNAUT By Philip Glouchevitch Simon & Schuster 239pp $21 President-elect Bill Clinton and his Labor Secretary appointee, Robert B. Reich, are deeply interested in a corporate apprenticeship program for the U.S. inspired by the widely lauded German model. That alone makes Philip Glouchevitch's Juggernaut as topical as tomorrow's news and a must for anyone who wants to know why the German program has won such acclaim. Although saddled with a title presumably designed to evoke memories of blitzkrieg tank warfare, Juggernaut, subtitled The German Way of Business: Why It Is Transforming Europe--and the World, is in fact a comprehensive description of the basic characteristics of German industry, emphasizing how German and U.S. practices differ. In the U.S., apprenticeships are rare: They amount to no more than summer desk jobs for a small number of college students. In Germany, more than 500,000 companies offer apprenticeships to students from the age of 15. The apprentices spend three to four days a week learning skills and an additional day-and-a-half at a state-run vocational school. Glouchevitch reports that the German chemical giant Hoechst employs more than 6,000 apprentices at its 32 plants, at a cost of 25,000 marks apiece per year. That's $16,000--about a year's tuition at a good U.S. college. After the Industrial Revolution brought the end of the 500-year-old guild system, German industry took on the guilds' job-training role to maintain the supply of skilled labor. While Glouchevitch also offers useful discussions of the Mittelstand--the small and midsize companies that are the economy's backbone--and the widespread sense of responsibility for employees' social welfare, the chapter on apprenticeships is alone worth the price of the book. | |
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