Employee voice and lifelong education capabilities in France and Germany: two models of responsibility

Abstract

This paper discusses the scope of the employee’s voice in lifelong education decisions, with a focus on qualified assembly‐line workers and professional development schemes allowing their upward mobility out of the assembly line. Using a capability approach, it investigates voice as part of people’s agency. Beyond examining the channels that allow employees to have a say in training matters – weak definition of voice – it addresses voice as a process that participates in the conversion of the available training resources and opportunities into lifelong education achievements – strong definition of voice. Comparing two subsidiaries of a multinational firm, one located in Germany and the other in France, we ask under what institutional and organizational conditions employees are able to express and then achieve what they value. In adopting a multi‐level perspective which integrates qualitative data of an institutional, organizational and individual nature, we show how in France and Germany the worker’s voice in training matters pertains to two different models of responsibility sharing. In Germany the worker’s voice is associated with self‐determination and self‐care as a consequence of the externalization of lifelong education outside the confines of the firm; this results in a weak voice that requires personal or family resources in order to get converted into a strong voice. In France, where national legislation obliges firms to devote a percentage of the gross wage bill to training, companies have historically played an important role in the lifelong education of workers, so that until the country’s last training reforms introducing a personal training account in 2014, the worker’s voice was strongly shaped by organizational factors. Whether this voice is weak or strong depends upon the organizational strategy, processes and involvement in lifelong training.