Transformations from Below: Shipyards and Labour Relations in the Uljanik (Croatia) and Gdynia (Poland) Shipyards since the 1980s
Final Report Abstract
The shipyards Uljanik in Pula (Croatia) and Stocznia Gdynia (Gdynia, Poland) were once not only the pride of the cities where they were located but also flagships showcasing the successful industrialization of once “backward” areas by socialism. Today, they are no more – and at the same time, they are ever present in the mind of the local population and their former workers. Both shipyards, which in the 1980s employed many thousands of workers and were a backbone of the regional economy, in the case of Pula actually its most important industrial employer, had managed to survive the travails of late socialism and the chaotic years of the early 1990s – but they did not survive the accession of their home countries to the European Union (2004 and 2013, respectively). Under EU competition rules, governments have much less leeway to support struggling firms than they had enjoyed previously. This pulled the rug under the feet from two permanently loss-making shipyards, whose business-case had already looked dubious in the 1980s. How would they compete with large East Asian producers, especially from the PR China, that continue to enjoy the tacit and often not so tacit encouragement by their government? Yet, as our project shows, producing a profit was for a long time not the only, or even not the dominant leitmotif of the business of the two shipyards. They produced community and sociability – and also meaning, maybe even an excess of it, so that workers and managers, but also the wider public forgot that building and exporting ships were not goals in their own. Uljanik’s company newspaper, its managers and also workers, for example, were extremely proud of the fact that since the late 1960s, it produced almost exclusively for foreign countries, in all corners of the globe. This was seen as recognition of the craftsmanship of the shipbuilders, the business acumen of the management, and the high reputation of Yugoslavia in the world. Yet they rarely actually made a profit from these ships. Gdynia’s focus on the Soviet market, in turn, prevented the shipyard from innovation but guaranteed full exploitation of capacity when the international market for new ships were depressed (after the oil price shock of 1973). In our project we have analyzed the strategies of the shipyards to navigate through the constantly changing framework conditions in the 1980s and 1990s. It appears that the end of communist rule was not so momentous per se, as privatization was long delayed and the state continued to play an important role; on the other hand, the late-socialist state looks weaker than expected – it proved unable, in contrast to Western governments, to initiate restructuring of the shipyards. Muddling through was the tactics of choice; organizational transformations of the shipyards which were close linked to political “reforms” did not necessarily mean that the substance of what happened on the shop-floor changed as well, or with the same speed and chronology. We suggest, therefore, a different timeline of transformation, which captures a long-term process of fundamental, intersecting changes in different realms of society from the early 1970s to EU integration. Our project built a huge database of primary sources which shall be used for future research. These include thousands of articles from company newspapers and local as well as national press, unpublished documents from archives, and interviews with workers. From the latter it transpires how strongly “ordinary” people perceive that things have fundamentally changed; it is also clear that workers articulate a strong sense of loss, not necessarily in terms of economic well-being: what they miss is recognition of their work, a sense of collective effort, and the possibility to be proud about the results of one’s own labor. We propose to take such sentiments as a starting point for efforts to preserve and showcase not only the material heritage of the shipbuilding industry in Gdynia and Pula, but also of its social life and the memories thereof. These can be a fundament for building new lives in a world where there is apparently no place for large shipyards in places like Pula or Gdynia.
Publications
- “Kontrnarracja perspektywy oddolnej: Program badań transformacji przemysłu stoczniowego”, in: Konrad Knoch (eds.), Historia Stoczni Gdańskiej, Gdańsk 2018, 551–566
Wegenschimmel, Peter / Piotr Filipkowski
- „Was ist ein Unternehmen – und wenn ja wie viele? Eine Organisationsgeschichte unternehmerischer Grenzverschiebungen“, Arbeits- und Industriesoziologische Studien 1, 2018) 25–37
Wegenschimmel, Peter
(See online at https://doi.org/10.21241/ssoar.64852) - “Building Ships and Surviving Late Socialism: The Shipyard “Uljanik” in Pula in the 1970s and 1980s”, IOS Mitteilungen 69, November 2019 (52 pages)
Brunnbauer, Ulf
- “Ethics of Work and Discipline in Transition: Uljanik in Late and Post- Socialism”, Review of Croatian History, 15(1), 2019, 191–213
Petrungaro, Stefano
(See online at https://doi.org/10.22586/review.v15i1.9803) - “Psychic Landscapes, Worker Organizing and Blame. Uljanik and the 2018 Croatian Shipbuilding Crisis”, Südosteuropa 67(1), 2019, 50–74
Hodges, Andrew
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/soeu-2019-0003) - “The long hand of workers’ ownership: Performing transformation in the Uljanik Shipyard in Yugoslavia/Croatia, 1970-2018”, International Journal of Maritime History 31(4), 2019, 860–878
Brunnbauer, Ulf / Andrew Hodges
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0843871419874003) - “Working Environment and the Roles of Factory Sociologists, and their Professional Experiences”, Przegląd Socjologiczny 68(3), 2019, 43–69
Wegenschimmel, Peter / Elżbieta Kolasińska / Dominika Polkowska
