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Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

Often the people who are willing to work long hours and lack formal qualifications are immigrants. Maybe there are not enough immigrants in your town? Or they would have needed to start as apprentices 5 years ago, and it's hard for them to get into the apprentice system?

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You need to have what's called "Meisterbrief" to run a bakery. That's the equivalent of having studied. You need 3 years of apprenticeship, then you make what's called "Gesellenprüfung", then you need to work at least 2 years in a bakery and then you need to go back to school for two years. That's quite some effort and it's not lacking formal qualifications.

Also, running a bakery is a fairly capital-heavy investment. Friends of ours closed their bakery when the oven broke - it would have cost at least 50k to repair and that was the point they decided to retire (despite offers from many people in the street to chip in).

From my perspective that seems heavily over regulated. As long as the bread is made in a sanitary fashion and doesn't make people sick, why should a baker be expected to go through so much training/schooling?

Meisterschule does not primarily teach you how to make bread. That’s the part before. It also teaches you how to educate new apprentices, how to run a business, etc. Maybe it’s over regulated, but on the other hand, we require solid education for a lot of professions. As long as the bridge doesn’t collapse, why should we expect an engineer to go through that much education? It’s only math and textbooks are freely available. As long as the patient survives, why do we require that doctors pass a certain education? It’s only biology and you can google most of it anyways.

IMO, how much regulation there should be has to do with the potential risks.

Food preparation is food preparation, and the practices needed to make food safely do not require years of education (and are proactively ensured by inspections everywhere in the developed world). So that risk can be crossed off the list easily.

Other risks? That the bread tastes bad, or that the business will not be run profitably? Those risks are better borne by the person investing their capital and labor, rather than trying to protect people from themselves through more education.

Watching doctors google stuff really makes you worry about the medical equivalent of StackOverflow code.

We all do google stuff. The part that requires training is knowing what to google for and how to interpret the results.

There's a big difference in requiring a doctor or a engineer to have schooling, people could die. But if people eat a crappy loaf of bread who cares?

People could actually die. Food poisoning of all kinds is a thing. Some of the stuff a baker works with is dangerous and flour explosions are a thing. Here’s a case where people died because of flour exploding in a mill: https://150.ngg.net/arbeitsbedingungen/gefahr-am-arbeitsplat...

Edit: Changed example.

That's why I said in my original post as long as the bread is made in a sanitary fashion. You can have health codes and food safety without requiring years of school. And your final point of flour exploding, that's a issue for flour mills not little bakeries. Most of the world does not require such extensive training to become a baker as Germany and the rest of the world is doing just fine.

The example page I picked is the workplace safety page of the union responsible food processing, bakeries among other things. And it explicitly list flour explosions as the largest danger in bakeries: “In Bäckereien und Mühlen sind Mehlstauexplosionen die größten Gefahren.“ (translated: “In bakeries and mills, flour explosions are the biggest dangers.”). A flour explosion in a bakery is something every local fire department trains for - and they’re not doing that for fun.

This is why you have fire regulations and inspections.

As best as I can tell, we haven't had a fatality from a bakery explosion in the US in the last 70 years, despite a much lower level of regulation. There's been a couple of large factory explosions and a few grain elevators/mills that have killed people, but ordinary bakeries seem not to have managed to do so.

There's also health risks from flour dust, but there's ample workplace safety regulations that help mitigate these.

Welcome to Europe. High quality everything comes at a price.

> hard for them to get into the apprentice system?

Speaking as a German, it's also a failure to integrate these people properly. The small bakery in my home town closed down, too.

Immigrants are in no short supply, but there are a few factors that prevent them from taking on a venture like that:

- They're generally forbidden to work until their formal immigration process has made enough progress in our bureaucracy, which can take years

- They usually have no capital to pay for up-front expenses like buying the buildings and equipment

- We segregate them from society by putting them in some sort of immigrant shelter while the bureaucracy does it's thing

Especially the last point is rather bad I think, it leads to parallel societies that keep to themselves rather than integrating into the German society surrounding them. Most Muslim migrants would probably rather not operate a "German"-style bakery in the traditional sense.

Our capability for integration is declining, too, because as a society we are becoming more and more estranged from our fellow citizens as community activities, especially in small towns and villages, dry up.

It very much sounds as if you're confusing immigrants and refugees here.

I disagree. As an immigrant in America it sounds very much like my first 11 months here. Legal immigrant, unable to work while waiting for paperwork.

> lack formal qualifications

Not sure about Germany, but there is a formal qualification for bakers in France.

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