Sinking shipyards

The Spanish public shipbuilding company Izar is the result of the 2001 merger of two public companies, the military shipbuilder Bazán, nationalized in 1947, and the civilian shipbuilder AESA, created in 1969 and fully nationalized in 1979. According to the CNT,

On march 14, 2001, the civilian and military shipyards are merged [...]. The reasons were in principle obvious: bankruptcy of AESA and an attempt to finance the civilian shipyards through the military ones.

Spanish shipbuilding had already been reorganized in the 1980's, under the Socialist government of Felipe González, resulting in the loss of 14,000 jobs in the industry.
Labour conflict in the southern shipyards of Sevilla and Puerto Real started again in december 2003. According to a communist newletter, the root of the conflict is the lack of any shipbuilding contracts for 2005, and the decision by the Spanish government not to subsidize the existing contracts (existing EU regulations allow 6% of the contracted price to be subsidized). 4,000 jobs were lost in 2001 in "auxilliary industries", and 11,000 are now in jeopardy due to the lack of contracts.
It turns out that some of the shipyards formerly owned by Bazán, such as Izar-Fene, are barred by law from bidding for civilian contracts. In the case of Izar-Fene, this is a result of some European regulation dating back to 1984, two years before Spain even joined the EU! In November of 2003, the minister of Economy (and now IMF managing director) advocated the creation of a European shipbuilding consortium as the solution to the ills of the Spanish public shipyards. (source)
My conclusion is that the situation in the shipbuilding industry is no different than in mining, and that everything (monopoly, nationalization and subsidies) has been tried already, and both the successive governments and the unions have displayed their characteristic lack of imagination over the past 25 years of industrial reform. There is at least one prosperous private shipbuilder, though, Unión Naval. Indeed, the European Commission reports "complaints" from other Spanish shipyards as part of the reason for their investigation of Izar's subsidies.