SAINT-NAZAIRE, France — The hull rising in the dry dock here is 345 meters long, will carry 6,200 passengers and will not be delivered until 2029. Behind it in the order book are five more ships. Behind them, in the hiring office, is a problem that the shipyard’s managers describe as more pressing than any contract: finding 1,200 welders, pipe fitters and electricians in the next two years.
European shipyards hold firm orders for 68 cruise ships worth about 61 billion euros, according to figures compiled by a maritime research group in Oslo, the largest backlog in the industry’s history. Yards in France, Italy, Germany and Finland build nearly every large cruise ship in the world, a position that Asian competitors have so far failed to break, and cruise operators, flush after three record years, have been ordering ships faster than anyone can build them. Several yards have stopped quoting delivery dates before 2033.
“The orders are not the constraint. Steel is not the constraint. People are the constraint,” said Gwenaël Riou, whose company, Atlantique Soudure, supplies 240 welders to the yard as a subcontractor. “The average age of my welders is 49. I lose 20 a year to retirement and I train 12. You can do that arithmetic without me.”
The shortage is the legacy of the industry’s last crisis. European shipbuilding lost about 40 percent of its workforce between 2008 and 2016, as yards closed and the survivors cut staff, and a generation of young people in port towns chose other trades. Cruise ships, which are built from millions of individually welded parts and finished to hotel standards, need far more labor per ton than cargo vessels, and the work cannot be moved to a cheaper country without moving the yard.
Yards are responding with wages, which have risen about 18 percent in three years for skilled trades in Saint-Nazaire, to around 2,300 euros a month net for an experienced welder, and with recruitment abroad. About a third of the workers on the dock here are employed by subcontractors that bring staff from Portugal, Romania, the Philippines and India, under arrangements that unions have challenged in court and governments have mostly tolerated. The yard itself has doubled apprenticeship places to 300 a year.
Maëlys Guéguen, 19, is in her second year of a welding apprenticeship and spends three days a week on the ship and two in a training center. “My parents wanted me to do something in an office,” she said. “I told them the office does not have six years of work guaranteed. The ship does.”
Kristian Halvorsen, a maritime economist in Oslo, said the backlog was both a triumph and a warning. “Europe kept this industry when it lost almost every other kind of shipbuilding, because cruise ships are the hardest ships to build,” he said. “The risk is that Chinese yards, which delivered their first large cruise ship in 2024, learn to do it while Europe is still looking for welders. The order book buys time. It does not buy people.”
On the dock, Mr. Riou was more direct. “If a young person in this town can hold a torch steady,” he said, “I will hire them today and teach them the rest.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section B, Page 7 of the European edition with the headline: Europe’s Cruise Shipyards Are Booked Through 2033. Finding Welders Is the Hard Part..
