“Made in Germany” was once a vow. Today it is a costume.

Walk into the glass headquarters of BMW, Siemens, or Bosch. The air is filtered silence. The floors are mirrors. But beneath the polish the logic is rot. The world’s most famous machines are engineered by a ghost crew the manufacturers use up and refuse to name.

It starts with a cheap magic trick. You apply to build the future. You see the logo. The legacy. The prestige. But the contract you sign belongs to a temp agency you have never heard of. Often the middleman is just the Titan in a cheaper suit. They book the profit on one ledger and bury the wages on the other.

The weapon is the Werkvertrag. The Contract for Services.

Legally the corporation is not hiring a human. It is purchasing a “result” that regrettably requires a pulse. Contractors bid against each other to be the cheapest. The margin is carved directly out of your rent. You solve the Titan’s problems at the Titan’s desk. Yet you enter through the service door wearing a badge of the wrong color. A permanent guest in your own life.

The machine is calibrated for extraction. Run the engineer until the metal fatigues. Burnout. Anxiety. Exhaustion. Then simply cancel the subscription. No firing necessary. The worker is shipped to the unemployment office for repairs. The company keeps the product. The state pays for the therapy. A supply chain of broken parts.

Look at who feeds the grinder. It isn’t random. It is disproportionately the people HR loves to call “PoC.” The industry adores this acronym. It signals openness. It proves they cannot be racist. After all they did not say Black. They did not say Brown. They used the polite import. It is a linguistic shield. It allows them to wear diversity as a mask while practicing segregation as a business model. They get the virtue points. You get the service entrance. The label is inclusive. The contract is not.

This explains the industry’s favorite ghost story. The Fachkräftemangel. The skills shortage.

Executives weep about a talent drought while qualified engineers sit on their couches. Both statements are true. No one asks how. There is no shortage of skill. There is only a shortage of PoC willing to be politely discarded.

The rational adapt. You endure the hazing for two years. Leave sooner and you look unreliable. Then you defect. To American firms in Berlin. To countries where engineers are assets not overhead. Germany has become a free training camp for its competitors.

The quarterly reports look immaculate. The efficiency metrics glow a soothing green. That is the true craft. You cannot cure a rotten system in a quarter but you can sanitize the spreadsheet. Germany believes it is optimizing.

It is dismantling its own engine mid-flight and calling it aerodynamics.