Paper short abstract:

In this paper I address the way shipbuilding workers attempt to cope with the conditions of their existence and of employment precariousness in the context of shipbuilding activities in the Perama zone, a suburb of western Piraeus.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I address the way shipbuilding workers attempt to cope with the conditions of their existence and of employment precariousness in the context of shipbuilding activities in the Perama zone, a suburb of western Piraeus. Added emphasis is placed on how workers conceive of their involvement in local labour processes. The ethnographic data show that workers create socially meaningful relationships and construct webs of significance through employment in the context of a cruel labour market. Shipbuilding workers, by being part of wider socio-economic relations, devise survival strategies through which a series of facts and processes gain meaning, which in turn help them face the violence of extreme situations. Hence, I look at workers' views and positions at various levels, including those of motives, strategies, representations and prestige as well as values. The ethnographic case of the Perama zone provides us with the opportunity to realize that even though agents are seemingly integrated passively into power games they themselves perceive this process in their own way, informed by their past and present coercive conditions of existence.