Breaking the cycle of School, Government Job for Life, Retirement

We decided to go abstract as a sort of summary of how government workers are made in Germany and many other countries. In Germany, though, the status of "career civil servant" they call Beamte has been or focus because it is in many ways such a strange institution.

Imagine it a bit like the old US un-firable teacher stereotype, with the worst thing that can happen is ending up in the "rubber room" unless the employee becomes a bona fide felon with a sentence of more than a year.

While this is an easy joke to make and a barely acceptable sketch of the system, it does not serve as a good explanation of stereotypical official behavior, such as the "[Update] German police crowd control: the "Flexi-Kettle" and the official reaction to violence and clashes.

The main areas where you find this privileged type of civil servant are schools, law enforcement, the judicial system, and the general administration. The one thing all of them have in common is the trajectory of the workers: school, government job for life, retirement.

In the 20st Century industrial society, similar paths existed in some of the larger private sector industries, from the quintessential coal miner to the steel worker, to the postal service, the railroad, the auto worker, and the public utility worker. But even in these industries, people would not necessarily remain with the same company throughout life.

Some of these government entities have been privatized in Germany in the last 25 or so years, a move that makes small government enthusiasts happy and also means your post office worker may have had a successful career as a tree trimmer before switching to processing dead trees in the form of letters and stamps.

In the remaining "core" areas, little has changed, and those who think outside of the box are rare enough to be mentioned prominently. The boringly predictable sequence of sound bites in favor of the German government's decision to introduce general collection of communications meta data is but one example of official group think fostered in part by the cycle of "school, government job for life, retirement".

So, when a thesis by a graduate of a German police academy that questioned the straight trajectory was featured in some of the countries major newspapers, we perked up. The author of that thesis advocates some refreshingly simple ideas about how to give police officers a slightly wider view of the society they will serve. He asks: why not make future officers do internships in places like a social care home, a drug rehab clinic or another institution of civil society.

You may argue that such measures are not needed if you buy into the standard argument that officers live in the community, too, that they have kids and see schools as parents and so forth. But then you may not be aware of how groups of professionals tend to socialize outside of work and of the tendency to form fairly uniform circles over time and in countries where moving to the other end of the land means a five hour drive.

The blogster would find it nice to know, for example, that the tax person on the phone explaining some odd provision of the tax code had spent at least a short period of time out there "in real life".

Even if that meant, as mentioned in one of our older posts, that the BDSM aficionado at a post-event volunteer party turned out to be - I kid you not - an IRS employee.