‘Many Tears Were Shed’: Workplace Occupations, Emotions, and the Moral Economy of the Fight against Redundancies in the Netherlands, 1972–2000

In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, workplace occupation belonged to the standard repertoire of workers’ and trade union activism in the Netherlands. Between 1972 and 2000, 177 of them can be identified. In this article, I focus on the role of emotions in the motives and behaviour of the occupiers, as reported in digitized newspapers. I will argue that these emotions were closely related to the moral economy of the occupiers and expressions of a specific ‘emotional regime’, connected to the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist labour relations. In a second part I analyse the fight against closures and redundancies in Dutch shipbuilding between 1978 and 1985 to exemplify this connection.