Contract Work in the Recession

Abstract

In 1980 the British Steel Corporation made nearly 6000 of its workers at the Port Talbot steelworks redundant. These redundancies were the latest in a series of reductions which have brought BSC’s Port Talbot workforce from 12 500 in March 1979 to the 1984 level of 4800. A broad interest in the consequences of these job losses has guided the ESRC-funded Steel Project established at University College Swansea under the directorship of Dr C. C. Harris. The Project has two distinct phases.¹ The first phase investigated the labour-market behaviour and domestic organisation of a sample of those workers made redundant from BSC in 1980. The second phase has been concerned with the wider effects of the recession in Port Talbot and with responses to job losses. This chapter describes some of the early findings of the second phase.