Assurances of Friendship

Dr. Johanna Wolf studied the responses of trade unions in the shipbuilding industry sector that is particularly vulnerable in regard to developments on the world market. With the Oil-crisis in 1973 the demand for tanks sank and the production was relocated, unemployment rose and tightened the competition between shipbuilding industries in different countries. Wolf has made a multi-level analysis, combining the reactions of a German shipbuilding company, the Bremer Vulkan Werft, the meetings of the German trade union IG Metall, and the conferences of the European and International Metalworkers’ Federations. This enables her to reconstruct how the global shifts in the sector were perceived, constructed and dealt with in different contexts. She also shows how arguments and positions moved between the local, national, European and international level, and how in this process a transnational sphere of references emerged.