The Incidence and Nature of Redundancy in the Northern Ireland Shipbuilding Industry 1972 – 1983

The severity of the recession in Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s has stimulated considerable interest in the analysis of the spatial and sectoral incidence of redundancy. In this paper two separate approaches to this topic are identified. In the labour-market – manpower analysis approach detailed empirical case studies were used to assess the local labour-market impact of specific major redundancies. More recently, aggregate official data have been used to investigate the sectoral and spatial incidence of recession in Great Britain. This paper extends this second approach by analysing, for the first time, some aspects of the incidence of redundancy in Northern Ireland. It is argued that trends in the level and incidence of redundancy are strongly affected by sectoral influences, and the analysis is concentrated in particular on the examination of redundancies in the regional shipbuilding industry between 1972 and 1983. It is concluded that redundancies in this sector differ from those elsewhere in the regional economy in terms of both nature and timing: shipbuilding redundancies affected predominantly older and male workers and peaked two or three years later than redundancies in other sectors. This pattern can be related to changes in the external market conditions facing the industry in the late 1970s, and to the specific corporate response of Harland and Wolff plc to these in the 1980s.