Jon Golde is part of United Europe’s Young Leader program in 2026. Originally born in Germany, he is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Yale University in the U.S. He previously spent two years at Boston Consulting Group focusing on large-scale transformations in the consumer goods space. In a personal capacity he enjoys writing about the intersection of political economy and lived experience and the effect of culture, institutions and incentives on individual behavior.
If one thing became uncomfortably clear to me in my first six months in the U.S., it’s this: Americans — across politics, class, and background — seem to simply carry a higher baseline of agency. Not “agency” as a buzzword. Agency as reflex: “If something is broken, I can do something about it”. Not asking whether it is your responsibility but assuming it. It’s fuck around and find out.
When I arrived at Yale, I expected an Ivy bubble — that elegant tower, detached from the street. Instead, I stepped into a civic engine: student groups, clinics, partnerships, volunteering — real work that spills beyond campus into our community of New Haven. People behaving as if they can move reality until they do.
And yes — Germany also has volunteers. Dedicated people. Quiet heroes. I don’t intend to caricature home. But something still felt different to me, and I keep returning to it: in Germany, we often outsource responsibility upward — to the municipality, to “the system”, to committees, to representatives. At work and in life. We became spectators with strong opinions — excellent at voicing them (like I do in this blog!) but don’t feel called to action. Why I believe that is will be discussed in this post; especially in the workplace.
Let’s start with culture. I grew up in a small town in Northern Germany whose city center is slowly dying, since years — empty storefronts, low foot traffic, no new ideas. Last Christmas, I heard the same chorus: “It’s getting worse”. Everyone sees it. Everyone complains. What I didn’t understand is why the story always ends there.
Why does frustration so often terminate in resignation? The common German comeback is immediate: “Mach du es doch.” As if action is naïve. As if trying is embarrassing. As if the only serious stance is critique. Why are we not empowering those who dare as much?
My take: Germany doesn’t just feel less agentic. We have built institutions that structurally train agency out of individuals. We have built a dense net of representatives, unions, worker’s councils that turns citizens and employees into clients alike.
Here’s the mechanism: When protection is strong, representation is robust, and rules are dense, the individual learns a subtle lesson: “Someone else will carry the conflict for me”. Not always. Not everywhere. But often enough to shape culture.
In the workplace, Germany’s model is uniquely institutionalized. In 2023, >45% (OECD) of employees in Germany were represented by employee representative bodies (works/staff councils). In the US that’s around 10%. Also, Germany has explicit legal protection against any dismissal, requiring “social justification” under the Protection Against Dismissal Act (KSchG) for covered employees. That’s also not the case in the US and I really like their term of employment “at will”. “I hate my job” turns into a funny statement here.
Again: I agree that these institutions exist for reasons — power imbalances are real. But here’s the uncomfortable question: What do these structures teach people? At the extend in which we have them?
If a council negotiates for me, if the contract is largely standardized, if dismissal is highly constrained, if change requires multiple layers of formal consultation — then I can live a whole career without practicing the muscles that are rewarded:
- negotiating my value
- giving and receiving direct feedback
- switching roles proactively
- building portable skills
- taking professional risk
- owning outcomes rather than processes
Our setting is nothing but a political economy of infantilization. Protection morphs into paternalism. Representation becomes substitution. This can only slow change.
Do not get me wrong, it’s not that I think German employees are lazy. Not because councils are inherently evil. But because any system that multiplies veto points logically increases transaction costs. It becomes rational to avoid bold moves, because every move triggers process. And companies lose the very resources they would need to remain competitive.
I’ve seen it at work: perfectly reasonable tools blocked by worker’s councils because they’re “not approved”. Complex multi-council architectures proudly described as “best practice”. In those environments, speed doesn’t die in one dramatic moment. It dies in a thousand small procedural deaths.
The “safety” story also has a behavioral shadow: German employees on average reported >15 sick days in 2023 (Federal Statistical Office). That’s a full 6% of total workdays in any year. We are losing a full 6% of productivity. Every. Year.
Of course, the number will never be zero. But if we are honest with ourselves: were all of those sick days truly unavoidable? Or has it become socially acceptable to call in sick simply because you’re “not feeling it”? Would anyone stand up and openly challenge that? By raising the question, I probably am. Yet there seems to be a quiet consensus that this is somehow acceptable. And here is the contradiction: if one was genuinely concerned about illness — about the very real mental health crisis — we would be careful not to dilute those terms by using them casually. If everything becomes sickness, then sickness itself loses meaning.
After all, agency isn’t only about founders and startups. It’s about everyday self-governance: what you do when no one is watching. I really found the example of US retailer Nordstrom interesting — a textbook case study on incentives and ownership. Nordstrom has long used a largely commission-based compensation for parts of its sales workforce. Outstanding performance came with outstanding compensation. Their employee rulebook knew just one sentence: Act as if this was your company.
And from this something powerful followed. Employees didn’t just “do their jobs.” They built client books, initiated home deliveries, cultivated deep customer relationships, and evolved into trusted advisors. Nordstrom became synonymous with exceptional service — not because of a detailed rulebook, but because of aligned incentives and individual responsibility.
Those workers must be stressed you think? Yet when a union sought to represent Nordstrom salespeople in the early 1990s, employees ultimately voted to decertify it. They did not perceive the commission model as exploitation; they saw it as opportunity. They preferred ownership over insulation.
What matters for my argument is not necessarily “unions good/bad.” It’s the cultural difference in what the system is optimizing for:
- In the commission model, the individual learns: service > performance > reward.
- In heavily standardized systems, the individual learns: compliance > stability > sameness.
Commission can be stressful. Unequal outcomes can be unfair. Incentives can be gamed. But the model forces a type of agency: I own my result.
The tipping culture in U.S. restaurants makes the same point: Tips are typically not pooled by default; they are tied to the individual server. It is explicitly built around the idea that individual performance can be directly rewarded.
Again, the real target is not unions. It’s a societal default. My argument is bigger than “works councils are bad”. That’s too cheap — and frankly wrong. My argument is this: Germany has become so committed to eliminating insecurity that we also eliminate the conditions under which adults learn. Because learning requires friction:
- the possibility of failure
- the need to adapt
- the discomfort of negotiating
- the risk that you might have to change course
AI gets me especially worried in this context. In the age of AI, the cost of low agency grows. A labor market that cannot reallocate quickly, reskill quickly, and redesign roles quickly will not become more humane — it will become less competitive, and ultimately less protective.
I once spoke with the CEO of a German Mittelstand company and asked whether AI had delivered measurable efficiency gains. Ironically, headcount had increased. They needed additional staff to build and implement AI capabilities. But how would you ever translate productivity gains into competitiveness if reducing headcount is extremely difficult or prohibitively costly? If efficiency does not lead to structural adjustment, it remains merely an accounting exercise.
Contrast that with companies like Amazon, which publicly reported workforce reductions of more than 10% in recent restructuring waves while simultaneously investing heavily in automation and AI. When productivity improvements can be reflected in leaner structures, margins expand and capital is freed for reinvestment.
The strategic question for Germany is straightforward: if firms cannot flex their cost base when technology improves productivity, how will they stay competitive against those that can?
It’s this paradox I can’t ignore: When we protect positions too hard, we stop protecting people. Because the highest form of protection in a transforming economy is not a guaranteed chair. It’s employability: skills, mobility, confidence, and the habit of self-representation. A different north star: protect transitions, not stagnation.
If Germany wants to stay prosperous, I think we need to modernize the social contract around one principle: Protect people, not positions. That could mean:
- stronger support for transitions (reskilling, placement, mobility) rather than freezing organizational charts
- a cultural reset toward adult-to-adult workplace relations: direct feedback, direct negotiation, direct responsibility — and rewarding good performance
- works councils that evolve from “veto” to “co-architect” — guardrails plus speed, not guardrails versus speed
Yes, being laid off can be painful. Temporarily. But what it is not is moral failure. It is not the end. In the U.S., I sense a harsher system — but also a wider cultural acceptance that reinvention is normal. That mindset is not cruelty. In its best form, it’s energy.
Germany doesn’t need to become America. But Europe cannot afford to become a museum: zero risk, beautifully regulated, proudly protected, quietly declining. Or if we did we might want to become the Louvre — where some theft enabled us to grow.
But at what point did we start confusing safety with maturity? At what point did we start tolerating mediocracy?
By Jon Henrik Golde