This article examines how globalization shaped work and employment in the German shipbuilding industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Official documents show that, as a response to global competition, originally large and labor-intensive shipyards in the northwest of Germany evolved into lean and nimble high-technology companies across four decades. Oral history interviews with former migrant and nonmigrant staff of two leading shipyards reveal that this large-scale industry transformation is a hitherto hidden history of labor mobility, migration, and evolving dimensions of diversity in the workplace. Migration is a lens through which to understand how corporate responses to global developments led to persistent patterns of social exclusion and inequality between and within groups of workers with and without migrant backgrounds that have not been documented before, namely: social divisions, unequal access to vocational training and retraining programs, unequal career opportunities, unfair redundancies, and unequal impact of precarious work.

本文探讨了二十世纪下半叶全球化如何影响德国造船业的工作和就业。官方文件显示，为了应对全球竞争，德国西北部最初的大型劳动密集型造船厂在四十年间发展成为精干、灵活的高科技公司。对两家领先造船厂的前移民和非移民员工的口述历史采访表明，这一大规模的行业转型是迄今为止隐藏的劳动力流动、移民和工作场所多样性不断变化的历史。移民是一个镜头，可以通过它了解企业对全球发展的反应如何导致有或没有移民背景的工人群体之间和群体内部持续存在社会排斥和不平等模式，这些现象以前从未有过记录，即：社会分化、获得职业机会的不平等培训和再培训计划、不平等的职业机会、不公平的裁员以及不稳定工作的不平等影响。