Bureaucracy: regulations and laws instead of personal responsibility

"The personal responsibility of companies is increasingly being replaced by guidelines, specifications, and laws," says Kurt Krautscheid, President of the Koblenz Chamber of Crafts. The master roofer is familiar with many – sometimes paradoxical – examples of bureaucracy.

This article is part of the special feature on bureaucratic madness in the skilled trades.

"There's a regulation for every little thing these days," says Kurt Krautscheid, master roofer and president of the Koblenz Chamber of Skilled Crafts . As a typical example of bureaucracy, the head of the company "Krautscheid Roofing" cites the Supply Chain Act , which came into force in 2023 and was initially not supposed to affect small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): However, in the processing of orders, the documentation requirements fall to the craft businesses that act as suppliers. "The real art of dealing with this law, therefore, lies in shifting the due diligence obligations onto the small and medium-sized enterprises during contract drafting," Krautscheid emphasizes.

Or take labor law . In implementing the EU directive on recording working time, Germany has chosen the path of maximum bureaucracy, explains the entrepreneur from Neustadt/Wied. "I know craft businesses that are renting additional space to store paper files."

The entrepreneur and president of the Chamber of Skilled Crafts emphasizes the importance of discussing concrete examples of bureaucracy with federal, state, or local politicians so that these issues can be gradually dismantled. For instance, he says he has to provide the trade supervisory authority with a job description for a pregnant woman in his roofing business , "even though I don't employ any pregnant women on the construction site."

Another example is data protection . According to the GDPR, companies must assure customers that their personal data will be deleted when the customer relationship ends. However, the tax authorities require that tax-relevant documents be kept for ten years. This creates a dilemma that companies can only resolve with considerable organizational and technical effort – if at all.

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And so many issues would become self-perpetuating, placing an enormous burden on entrepreneurs and distracting them from their actual work on the construction site or in the workshop.

One bureaucratic requirement follows another

Another example is workplace safety. According to the employers' liability insurance association, roofers are generally no longer allowed to work from a ladder – only from scaffolding. "This leads to paradoxical situations during some repair work," the business owner explains. "We manage it and naturally want to guarantee our employees the highest possible level of safety, but the documentation requirements and employee training need to be streamlined." More personal responsibility is needed here.

This also applies to the handling of polyurethane (PU) foam . Since August 2023, training in the use of PU construction foam has been mandatory . "This training must be repeated regularly," reports Krautscheid. Employers are now required to document this. "The paradox here is that PU foam can be bought and used in hardware stores – completely without training and by inexperienced laypeople. Something's not right there."

One bureaucratic requirement leads to another, forcing business owners to deal with it in the evenings or on weekends. Whether it's the advance payment of social security contributions , which creates an enormous administrative burden for construction companies, or the working time law, which allows little flexibility and has effectively eliminated the valuable concept of trust-based working hours, replacing it with a documentation requirement. "It seems as if politicians are clinging to such rules. There's simply a lack of trust in entrepreneurship and a lack of practical understanding."

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