Shipping Off Labour: Changing Staffing Strategies in Globalized Workplaces

The European market opened the opportunity for the free movement of goods, service, capital and labour. In this project we look at how employers use the European market to change their production and staffing strategies in order make profit and how that affects working conditions for European workers and employment relations for key institutions in political economies. We take the European shipbuilding industry as a case because of its integrated transnational production structure and the overwhelming presence of migrant workers in European yards. The effects of this so-called regime competition are expected to be particularly strong in industries with high trans-border mobility of labour, production factors and/or relocation of production. In the labour-intensive shipbuilding industry, we find all these kinds of movements. In this project, we look at the respective national shipbuilding industries of Norway, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Romania. Our study maps developments since the 1990s and looks at how the main actors and institutions have evolved alongside developments in labour market regulation and enforcement in national shipbuilding. Based on qualitative interviews with trade unions, management, and policy makers, we also analyse the ways in which these developments have been associated with transnational market changes, including cross-border factor mobility, and/or regulatory initiatives at the EU level.

Over the last decades, globalisation has transformed the shipbuilding industry into a dispersed network of large corporations and subcontractors. The enlargement of the EU/EEA Single Market facilitated movement of labour to the West and production to the East. Currently, technological changes are causing additional restructurings. Yet, so far, we know little about the determinants and interactions between cross-border production and staffing strategies in an enlarged European Single Market. Bridging the literature on restructuring of production and labour mobility, this project studies how yards adjust their staffing and production strategies through a multi-level comparative approach. We will examine 1) how the change in regional economic integration (eastern enlargements) impacts on production and staffing strategies; 2) how these changes are negotiated by the social partners and 3) how technological changes affect employer strategies. Shipbuilding offers a special case because it allows for examining changes in production as well as staffing strategies. Based on qualitative case studies in Norway, Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania, this project explores the overall research question of: how does regional economic integration through eastern enlargement, impact on vertical disintegration and cross-border mobility, and what is the interplay between these two factors? At the individual yard level in the five countries, we will trace, together with leading experts from abroad, changes in production and staffing strategies and changes in firm boundaries induced by labour migration, the national business structure and new technologies. At the national sectoral level we will analyse how industrial relations are affected by changes in the staffing strategies of companies within the shipyards. At the EU level, we will trace how recent changes in EU regulations impact the relationship between production and staffing strategies in different corners of the Single Market.