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Bothe, Katharina and Decker-Lange, Carolin
(2023).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.27
Abstract
This article examines how globalization shaped work and employment in the German shipbuilding industry in the second half of the 20th century. Official documents show that, as a response to global competition, over four decades originally large and labor-intensive shipyards in the northwest of Germany evolved into lean and nimble high-technology companies. Oral history interviews with former migrant and non-migrant staff of two leading shipyards reveal that this large-scale industry transformation is a hitherto hidden history of labor mobility, migration, and evolving dimensions of diversity in the workplace. Migration is a lens through which to understand how corporate responses to global developments led to persistent patterns of social exclusion and inequality between and within groups of workers with and without migrant backgrounds that have not been documented before, namely: social divisions, unequal access to vocational training and retraining programs, unequal career opportunities, unfair redundancies, and unequal impact of precarious work.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
