Navigating cross-border labour mobility and employment security in European shipbuilding: lessons from the COVID-19 crisis

Ines Wagner, Karen Jaehrling, Aurora Trif, Devi Sacchetto and Jan Czarzasty
Additional contact information
Ines Wagner: ARENA, University of Oslo, Norway
Karen Jaehrling: IAQ, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Aurora Trif: Dublin City University Business School, Ireland
Devi Sacchetto: Department FISPPA, University of Padua, Italy
Jan Czarzasty: SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2025, vol. 31, issue 1, 41-54

Abstract: This article investigates how cross-border mobility in the European shipbuilding industry affected the employment security of workers on standard and non-standard contracts in sending and receiving countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws on qualitative findings from Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland and Romania, where shipbuilding production is integrated into transnational networks, leading to high cross-border mobility. Despite restrictions and a reduction of shipbuilding activities, the east-west labour mobility continued during the pandemic contributing to employment security in the east and addressing labour shortages in the west. The findings show that the type of employment contract, national employment protections and workers’ mobility status (e.g. posted or self-initiated) influence workers’ vulnerability. Specifically, the mobile workers with the most secure employment were also better protected by government measures than those in less secure employment during the pandemic, resulting in hierarchised groups of cross-border labour. Workers engaging in circular migration across Europe were the least protected.

Keywords: Labour mobility; production mobility; cross-border mobility; job security; sending and receiving countries; crisis; shipbuilding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10242589251322885 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:treure:v:31:y:2025:i:1:p:41-54

DOI: 10.1177/10242589251322885

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().