Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Workers around the World. Case Studies 1950-2010

What is it about?

Labour in the Brazilian Shipbuilding Industry: a contribution to an analysis on the recovery period is a chapter what analyzes the changes that took place in labour relations and activities within the Brazilian shipbuilding industry during the recovery in activity in the main shipyards from the late 1990s. The study has three central parts: first; the start and increase in the regional employment decentralization process in the country’s shipbuilding industry; second, it considers variables, mainly those linked to the number of jobs, school level, time working in the same company, age and wage rate; the third part analyzes information regarding man-power costs and productivity. The Brazilian shipbuilding industry has passed through distinct stages during its development. The period from the mid-1950s through to the early 1980s, witnessed the sector’s structural development, growth and peak, thereafter, during the 1980s and 1990s, this industry faced a marked drop in production and in employment leading to the closure of a number of shipyards. In the late 1990s, government policies promoted the sector’s recovery in Brazil. The Brazilian government, stimulated production through orders from the state-owned Petrobras/Transpetro monopolies, and the State demanded minimum local content percentages to oil and gas exploration and production activities and promoted tax and credit incentives from the Merchant Navy Fund (FMM). The current study highlights the definition of the Brazilian shipbuilding industry as a collection of small and medium-size shipyards. Within the production chain, shipyards are responsible for the construction and assembling of ships often involving complex production processes. Employment peaked during the 1970s at approximately 39,000 workers, and thereafter declined to the year 2000 where just over 5,000 workers remained in the sector. However, in the recovery period thereafter, there were over 41,000 workers by 2010.

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Why is it important?

The Brazilian shipbuilding industry’s recovery relied on a significant increase in the number of jobs to satisfy mainly domestic demand in shipbuilding and offshore work. The level of certainty in the increase in the number of domestic orders brought up the expectancy that the number of jobs would keep on growing (mainly the purchase orders from Petrobras to 2020). Thus, the need for trained man-power also grew and it reflected on the opening of new shipbuilding engineering schools in the country, besides all the technical schools inside the shipyards. However, on the other hand, we observed the working conditions’ casualization trend, resulting from man-power turnover linked to shorter work contracts and to the hiring of younger individuals as well as to lower salaries and the use of outsourcing programmes. By following world market trends, it is interesting to observe that, in comparison to leading Asian and European countries, with the exception of China, Brazil has lower man-power costs and a lower number of engineers, especially in relation to the industry’s total number of employees. The differential in this labour market is the importance given to the “learning by doing” process and to the contracting processes based on order book demand.

Perspectives