International Business : Cutbacks Threaten German Tradition of Worker Training : Labor: Critics fear a loss of productivity as companies scale down their apprenticeship programs.

Germany’s vocational training system--once the envy of countries the world over--is facing the prospect of an overhaul in the wake of a two-year recession, continuing high labor costs and the privatization of eastern German enterprises.

At stake is a centuries-old tradition of worker training that has made Germany a leader among industrial nations, with one of the highest rates of productivity in the world.

Traditionally, German high school students have had the option of spending the last years of their compulsory education getting on-the-job training from a wide variety of companies. But a combination of economic factors has forced German firms over the past few years to cut back on the number of apprenticeship positions offered to non-college-bound students.

The country has been seeking to attract a new wave of industries--ranging from pharmaceuticals and biotechnology to computer software and communications equipment. If it succeeds, however, the prospects for vocational training will be even dimmer, experts say, because those industries rely on automated processes and require comparatively fewer highly skilled workers.

At first, the cutbacks were blamed on the recession that peaked in Germany in 1993. The economy is growing again, but the number of spaces in apprenticeship programs is not.

“Big companies are using their training money to retrain their existing workers rather than training new workers, and that has cut the number of slots for apprentices in the last year by about one-fifth or so,” said Burkart Sellin, project coordinator for the European Center for the Promotion of Vocational Training, a Berlin think tank.

The cutbacks are even worse in the former East Germany, where owners of newly privatized companies have gutted apprenticeship programs to cut costs, he said.

Most of the twentysomethings turned away from apprenticeships end up stringing together a series of odd jobs, a practice known as “jobbing around,” Sellin said. Those jobs pay well by the standards of a recent high school graduate, “but in the long term, the [young workers] are diminishing their chances for a successful career and stable employment,” he said.

Government and labor officials worry that if German industry’s commitment to vocational training continues to wane, skilled workers will be in short supply 20 or 30 years down the road. They are also concerned that hundreds of thousands of Germans now coming of age will be consigned to lives of low-wage jobs--an especially grim prospect for a country accustomed to a high standard of living.

Reinhard Kraetzer, who runs the Regional Municipal Council for Social Affairs in the economically distressed Berlin suburb of Prenzlauerberg, said he expects a 40% shortfall in the number of apprenticeship positions available this spring to high school graduates in his district.

“All of them wrote applications to 20 to 50 places,” Kraetzer said. “Some of them give up hope and simply start doing odd jobs.”

The trend also troubles the Federation of German Industries, a Bonn trade group that represents the country’s largest employers. Its president, Hans-Olaf Henkel, has sent personal appeals to Germany’s 100 largest companies, asking them to bolster their commitment to vocational training.

“We think it’s a really big problem for Germany if these places [continue to be] reduced in the medium or long term,” said Silke Vennes, a spokeswoman for the employers organization.

But Vennes and others readily acknowledge that all they can do is ask and plead. There are no laws requiring companies to contribute to the vocational training tradition.

Ulrich Siegener, who runs the vocational training program for the Berlin manufacturing complex of electronics conglomerate Siemens, said a number of factors led the company to trim its apprenticeship program. Chief among them are investments in advanced machinery that reduce the need for human workers and outsourcing of work to smaller, more nimble companies.

“We’re simply trying to cut back on the costs of production,” Siegener said. He estimates that come September, he will have to deny at least 900 young adults spots in his program.

Bayer, a chemical and pharmaceutical company based in the Cologne suburb of Leverkusen, has reduced spaces in its apprenticeship program from 2,000 to 1,400, spokesman Thomas Reinert said.

In years past, the company trained hundreds of apprentices who went on to work for other manufacturing companies. Now Bayer says it can no longer afford to train more people than it plans to employ itself. Even those who make it into the program are not guaranteed permanent jobs--something their predecessors could take for granted, Reinert said.

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Germany’s powerful labor unions voice the most concerns about the trend. They say the cutbacks threaten to undermine German productivity at a time when competition from nearby low-wage countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic makes productivity Germany’s biggest asset.

“The reason the economy is running very well now is because the training here is so good,” said Guenther Horzetzky, secretary of the German Federation of Labor, which represents 10 million workers in 16 unions.

Privately, officials representing employers, workers and the government say they are skeptical that Germany’s vocational training programs will survive in their present form.

But they strongly doubt that their demise is at hand.

“Government and industry agree that training is the responsibility of enterprises, that it’s part of their operating expenses,” said Cornelia Yzer, who heads the Future Ministry. “It’s a great mistake to say, ‘We have to cut our expenses, so we’ll start with the young people.’ ”