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Bremerhaven 2001

Looking south up the river Weser from the television tower in central Bremerhaven. The SSW shipyard is in the far left corner. Bremerhaven was founded in 1827 as the new port of the hanseatic city of Bremen, who bought the land from the kingdom of Hannover at the beginning of the 19th century. For the next 150 years, it developed into a large port, a mass emigration centre to the New World and a ship building centre. The first Werft, or shipyard, had started even earlier, in 1821. Subject to the highs and lows of capitalism, employment in Bremerhaven’s shipyards grew to a peak of 9,000 in the 1970s. The main employers then were Rickmers Werft, Seebeck Werft, SUAG and Lloyd Werft. But the world wide economic crisis, competition problems with especially South Korea, German reunification, and a declining dollar to name only some of the reasons changed the world for the German ship building industry. After numerous bankruptcies and merging processes between the different companies, there are now only two important ship building companies in Bremerhaven: Lloyd-Werft and Schichau-Seebeck-Werft. Between them, they employ just 1700 people. Even these jobs are under constant review, as the very existence of the two remaining yards now depends on complex contractual arrangements involving the increasing outsourcing of work to low-waged east European sub-contractors.