Abstract
Labour mobility, posting of workers, and intra-corporate transfers of employees are sensitive social and policy issues in the European labour market, but at the macro level they may appear as manageable because affecting relatively small minorities of workers. The paper examined them in the extreme critical case of the ‘global workplaces’ of the Italian shipbuilding Fincantieri group, which in 2013 took over the Norwegian shipbuilding multinational Vard and is now one of the largest producers of ships in the world, with yards in Italy, Norway, Romania as well as in Vietnam, USA, Brazil. Given the weight of geographically-tied capital, Fincantieri has also engaged in so-called ‘reverse relocation’, by moving workers, leading to a situation where up to 80% of production workers are non-nationals. For this, Fincantieri represents an emblematic case study to analyse the dynamics characterising the European shipbuilding sector – and the European shipbuilding sector as a microcosm of European integration. Through a multi-sited case study covering the European yards, the paper looks at how the different regimes of labour mobility for EU and non-EU workers interact with ethnic hierarchies and labour segmentation, and at the challenges they raise for social regulations and collective organisation at local and
transnational level.
The paper is co-written by Aurora Trif, Jon Erik Dølvik, Guglielmo Meardi and Ines Wagner.
Download paper (restricted access).
Please note that this paper is work in progress and thus has limited distribution, please contact us if you would like access. Do not cite without permission from the author.
The event is hybrid with Ines Wagner partaking via Zoom. If you would like to attend digitally, contact Milla Elisabeth Blegen or Tyra Kristiansen Stave to get the Zoom link.