Industrial Relations and Social Security

A foreigner who spends any length of time in a country is bound to form impressions of the way social relations work. These impressions — which will say just as much about his own country — are probably as important as anything he reads in sociological studies. The author — as an Englishman in West Germany — was struck by the clearly defined distinctions of status, combined with a relative absence of class distinctions. That is to say, there are clearly defined chains of command in government and industry, and people are conscious of their status in the organisation, as shown by the use of functional titles as a form of address — ‘Herr Direktor’, ‘Herr Regierungsrat’ — or even (a nice and useful touch) ‘Herr Ober’, short for ‘Herr Oberkellner’, for waiters. At the same time there is considerable uniformity of life-style. German directors and trade unionists dress and look alike, their homes are furnished in the same sort of style, with differing degrees of lavishness, and they speak alike. There are strong regional accents, but hardly any class accents. (Coming back to South-East England, one could scarcely believe that people were not putting on caricatures of upper-class and lower-class accents.)