Considering the eagerness with which the industrialists warred with organized professionals and white-collar workers, one might have expected the bulk of salaried engineers to realize sooner or later how transparent were all pretenses of occupational solidarity with a top management that often was itself technically trained. The employers' lack of discrimination between graduates of the technische Hochschulen and engineers without such certification should have been revealing. Their policies should have opened the eyes of those who believed that their academic credentials were evidence of possessing what amounted to a secular version of salvation or election and therefore a meaningful basis for solidarity. The expectation that this realization would dawn on more and more engineers was, of course, fundamental to the Btib's existence. The principle of solidarity of all engineers on the basis of their employee status and regardless of educational differences was a point the union emphasized over and over again – for example, when it blamed the VDDI for having helped break the strike of the Berlin structural designers. With the exception of professions like physicians and lawyers, whose legal privileges were based on unique circumstances, the Btib argued, “the private sector leaves no room for estate-like stratification based on educational differences [auf Bildungsunterschieden beruhende stdndische Gliederung].” Especially in the industrial occupations, the Btib continued, “social boundaries cannot be drawn according to educational differences, but only according to the position in the production process that one occupies on the basis of performance.”