
Deutschland AG rethinks workers’ role in management - c0restraint
https://www.economist.com/business/2020/01/30/deutschland-ag-rethinks-workers-role-in-management
======
fxtentacle
Sounds like propaganda to me.

I'm German and my impression is that almost everyone is happy with the current
model where you have a legally guaranteed right of holding CEOs accountable.

Everyone, except the American hedge funds trying to squeeze out more profits
by increasing working hours, that is.

So to me, this article reads like "let's make Germany more like America in
that the rich rule the poor".

And I find it rather surprising that they went with "Deutschland AG" because
treating Germany like a country is usually only done by a rather weird tiny
subset of citizens who refuse to adhere to laws and instead revel in
conspiracy theories about foreign overloads secretly deciding what everyone
has to do.

But most weirdly I find that I haven't heard this set of laws being discussed
critically in German at all, but that instead an English article with odd word
choice should be the first to criticise it.

~~~
germanier
"Deutschland AG" was commonly used in political discussion up until the early
2000s, it even made it into Wikipedia
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_AG](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_AG)
and other encyclopedias. It has nothing to do with the Reichsbürger movement

~~~
fxtentacle
Wow, I didn't know :)

That said, I haven't encountered the terminology elsewhere, so I was surprised
to read it in this article.

------
twright
A more accurate title seems to be “Management rethinks workers’ role in
management.” Are there complaints about co-determination from workers
themselves (I’d be more interested to hear those)? Or is this management
complaining they can’t mistreat workers in the name of corporate profit?

~~~
fxtentacle
It's the latter and the article even concedes that mistreating workers won't
help much, either.

"European countries which do not embrace it hardly do better."

------
paulhart
“Only [...] SAP, a software-maker, is among the world’s 100 biggest companies.
Apple’s $1.4trn market value is roughly that of the entire DAX 30.”

Is this actually a problem though? The model seems to have provided some
insulation from global turmoil in the past; is having enormous corporations
the only important thing for a country’s economy? For as long as it doesn’t
fall foul of EU laws, I can see Germans wanting to maintain this strategic
advantage that other nations ignore while they’re busy chasing down every last
short-term dollar.

~~~
akira2501
Their GDP per capita is about 17% lower than the United States, but their GDP
per hour worked is only 3% lower with their average work-week being 22%
shorter than in the United States.

So, from a very narrow and short-sighted point of view.. they're just as
productive as we are, but they have 1/3 our population and they work fewer
hours which limits their ability to compete in the global marketplace.

For German companies that serve only domestically or within the EU, I doubt
the councils are a problem or even an impediment.. but for companies that want
to operate globally, I imagine it does reduce their ability to compete.

I guess the question for Germany is, do they want to sacrifice these broader
protections and slightly better working conditions in order to improve profits
for a handful of companies that can actually take advantage of it? I hope not,
but it looks like the groundwork is already being laid for a campaign to
change this.

~~~
thomasdullien
The "reduces their ability to compete"-argument does not hold water
considering the data, though. One useful measure of a countries
competitiveness is the size of their exports (because it implies that there is
a lot of foreign demand for the products from that country), or in their
"exports-to-population" ratio.

If you check
[https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports](https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports)
you can see that Germany exports about EUR 112bn worth of goods per month, on
a population of about 83 million, about EUR 1350 per head. For comparison:

Canada exports about 49bn CAD per month, on a population of 38m, for
approximately 1297 CAD per head.

The US exports about 208bn USD per month, on a population of 327m, for
approximately 638 USD per head.

If anything, the big weakness of the German economy is not that it is not
competitive enough, the big weakness of the German economy is a lack of
domestic consumption due to not much of the money actually reaching workers
pockets; this is a result of a fairly aggressive wage stagnation that set in
in the 2000s.

~~~
jnordwick
I've never heard of anybody using exports as development metric. It's usually
just a sign of developing country with cheap labor.

> wage stagnation that set in in the 2000s.

And imagine that. Seems to fit the low wage story pretty well.

~~~
thomasdullien
When speaking about "competitiveness", what measures aside from current
account balance and share of global exports is better suited?

Not to be snarky, but you can't do _any_ reading in economics about
competitiveness and not encounter the current account balance (which is
exports - imports): [https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6701/trade/importance-
of-...](https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6701/trade/importance-of-current-
account-deficit/)

------
arrrg
Workers’ Councils often don’t exist because people don’t dare to form one.
Despite pretty good rights for employees, it can still feel like painting a
target on your back.

I should have more forcefully driven for the creation of one in my small
company. But it’s all too late now. The company was sold by the owner to a
much larger US company and the day after that was announced, nearly a third of
employees were fired.

We are developing B2B SaaS and sold that in combination with professional
services, with about a 50:50 split in revenue from those two parts. The
company built its product without outside investments and has practically
always been profitable in the past, with ok revenue growth, but we were seeing
pressure from competitors who did have large investments.

The US company didn’t want professional services (and also not anyone doing
sales and marketing), they wanted the developers. A couple of weeks into this
that seems absurd, especially since they seem to be expecting to keep most of
the existing revenue which seems impossible since, you know, we had a 50:50
split in revenue and the people responsible for 50% of that (who had close
working relationships with the clients) are no longer there. They are now
flying people here but there is hardly anyone to teach them and … you know …
usually it takes at least a couple of months to get people up to speed. Months
in which our existing clients want to get work done! It’s so irrational. It’s
also deeply immoral and unethical.

Whether it be greed or a fundamental misunderstanding of how the product works
or what do I know … that whole thing was surreal and weird and I kept thinking
that one of the problems was that the person making the deal was fundamentally
not understanding the business. Maybe a workers’ council could have helped or
at least found a socially more responsible way.

But when the acquisition was only a rumor I frequently mentioned to my
colleagues that forming a council would be a good idea but never actually did
it. Because, you know, who would want to paint a target on their back.

But it is important for such institutions to exist. Employees inherently tend
to have less power than employers and their work is not really optional. They
can’t just decide to not do it and changing jobs or career or places where you
live can be difficult to impossible. That’s why that isn’t just some kind of
exachange of money for work. It has to be specifically and explicitly and
strongly protected and workers should always have a say in the business
because it concerns them. And their interests and the employers interests are
not always aligned.

------
gyulai
...the problem is that "worker codetermination" is not really about owners and
workers pulling on the same string, but rather worker representatives often
have a ridiculously narrow-minded focus on workers' interests while completely
disregarding what is and isn't economical for a company to do.

To give you one example: I used to work for one of Germany's biggest telcos.
Believe it or not: That company is unable to do geographically-targeted
advertising for reasons of worker codetermination. Worker reps in the
company's supervisory board argue that, since some employees get part of their
compensation through sales commissions, targeting advertising to region X
gives employees in region X an unfair advantage to earn more money than
employees in other regions.

Working for the same company, I was involved in a project to do natural
language processing in a ticket system the company was using to track repair
and maintenance work of radio units, with the goal of building a model to
recognize tickets that were in increased need of attention by higher-level
management. Even though it wasn't initially the project's goal to do so, the
thing that the model ultimately picked up on was basically indications of
employees being lazy as they handle those tickets. -- But the data I was given
was anonymized. It was argued that if it weren't anonymized, my project would
have never been approved by worker representatives in the supervisory board
for reasons of violating workers' right to "data protection".

~~~
blub
It seems to me that many programmers suffer from some privacy blind spot where
their brain literally freezes when they have to think about the negative
consequences of their latest software gizmo.

It was decided in a court of law that employers can't spy on their employees.
It's good that companies are being cautious. Not everything in this world
revolves around efficiency and tracking everything.

~~~
gyulai
I certainly do not suffer from "privacy blind spots". As a matter of fact,
I've worked for one company in the telco space doing industry-leading work on
setting standards about how to properly anonymize call detail records. And
then, in this German telco that I mentioned, we were doing groundbreaking work
setting up our data engineering in such a way as to comply with Germany's
stringent privacy protections where consumers are concerned. I now work in
another privacy-focused company.

But this one story I was telling:

Management: Please make a mathematical model that will predict if a radio unit
has repeated and prolonged outages, using well over a hundred independent
variables, ranging from technical information, to network topology, to
information from the ticket system.

Me: Done. Mathematical model says: Radio units have problems if the people
servicing them are lazy bums. Here is a system, based on natural language
processing, that will predict people being lazy bums with huge accuracy.

Management: So who are the lazy bums?

Me: Can't tell you that. Because privacy.

I mean. Come on...

~~~
blub
"Here is a system, based on natural language processing, that will predict
people being lazy bums with huge accuracy."

What could go wrong... I was quite impressed until you got to this point too
and thought I had been too harsh.

~~~
gyulai
The patterns my system noticed were literally things like this: There's an
error entered into the system by the NOC operator as an intermittent error on
the station. Field technician drives there. Enters something like "Station on
air upon arrival" into the ticket system. Does nothing else. (Like nothing to
diagnose or fix the actual problem). Closes the incident. Drives home. Pockets
the money for the time spent driving. A few days later (who would have thought
that?) a new incident is opened for the same station. Repeat once a week for
months and months.

I'm definitely not someone who is too naive to understand that technology like
NLP has limits. But this was a perfectly appropriate usecase for NLP and it
worked perfectly fine.

And people acting in this manner should not be immune from repercussions for
reasons of data protection.

~~~
gyulai
...also, it seems weird to me that workers representatives knew, before the
project even started, that it was in their best interest to ask for this data
to be anonymized. It was as if workers, collectively, knew the whole time that
this sort of thing was systematically happening, and were actively working
towards preventing management from finding out. That's what I mean by "not
pulling on the same string".

------
wongarsu
Version without paywall:
[https://outline.com/SvtKVv](https://outline.com/SvtKVv)

------
fxj
This is the situation in europe at the moment:

As far as the rules on employee participation are concerned, three groups of
countries can be distinguished in the 28 EU countries and Norway. In the first
group, consisting of ten countries, there is no employee participation. In the
five countries in the second group, employee participation is limited to
state-owned or recently privatised companies. But the largest group is made up
of 14 countries that provide for employee representation on the boards of
private sector companies above a certain size. There are large differences in
the minimum numbers of employees and other aspects of the procedures for
employee involvement at national level.

[http://de.worker-participation.eu/Nationale-
Arbeitsbeziehung...](http://de.worker-participation.eu/Nationale-
Arbeitsbeziehungen/Quer-durch-Europa)

------
contingencies
Does anyone have first hand experience with this system?

~~~
Ididntdothis
Many German workers have experience with this system. I have had 3 years. It
works pretty well in my view and creates some balance. It's probably not as
much fun for management but that's Ok. It bugs me that in the US the only
accepted stakeholders are the shareholders and nobody else counts.

~~~
anonsivalley652
Do you have any familiarity with IG Metall? If so, how helpful do you think
are they, or were, for organized labor?

Also, worker-owned co-ops seem the only way out of shareholder rent-seeking
and narcissistic management behavior because just giving workers input without
a fair share of profits is still similar to keeping slavery but adding a
suggestions box.

~~~
Ididntdothis
I was IG Metall. As a young person it felt a little restrictive but now I feel
it strikes a good balance. You make good money, no abusive workplace practices
and the companies are also successful. Win-Win for everybody.

~~~
anonsivalley652
Those of us who are Americans sorely need to rediscover general strikes and
practical labor unions that don't go crazy with organized crime or utopian
politics. Oklahoma was a socialist bastion, Henry A. Wallace got the DNC
Bernie Sanders-treatment, strikers of the 19th century were summarily executed
by Pinkerton and hired snipers like it was a prison riot, and decades of
strikes/strike breaking and unionization helped usher in a brief post-WW2 era
of prosperity. Now, poor and white-collar Americans argue unthinkingly and
constantly for austerity, mindless deregulation and giving more money to only
the rich (because of manufactured consent). I don't see how there's anything
but misery, fear of major disease and destitution for 75-90% of Americans; and
there aren't many good jobs for average workers because there's almost no
manufacturing ecosystem like there is in China.

------
sunkenvicar
Paywalled beyond the first two paragraphs.

~~~
dang
If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the
thread.

This is in the FAQ at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
and there's more explanation here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

