From a global history perspective, we intend to study shipbuilding labour around the world from World War II until the present. We will track the relocation of production and analyse its consequences to workforces in Europe, North and South America, and in East Asia from the 1980s onwards.
In analysing labour relations, labour conditions, composition of the workforce, workers’ recruitment, workers living conditions, labour cultures, labour conflicts, organization and leadership, shifts in production, the role of shipyards in national and international economy, governments policies and regulations and the social and economic effects of closures of shipyards, research sources utilised will be local, regional and national records of shipyard employers and shipyard unions, business records of individual firms, government records pertaining to the industry, local and national press and other media, interviews with government ministers, owners, managers and workers, and results of various surveys.
The proposal is a global labour history project, under the initiative of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, following the approach of earlier comparative studies on the history of dock workers and on the history of textile workers (Davies et al. 2000; Heerma van Voss et.al. 2010). The model will be the Collective Research Model (http://www.iisg.nl/publications/prolegom.pdf, p. 21 ).
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