O projeto “Inquérito aos jovens sobre o mercado de trabalho e o sistema de segurança social em Portugal” resulta de uma parceria entre o Observatório das Desigualdades e o Observatório do Emprego Jovem, ambos filiados no Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. Surge na sequência de um convite da Comissão para a Sustentabilidade da Segurança Social, criada pela Ministra do Trabalho, Solidariedade e Segurança Social do XXIII Governo Constitucional de Portugal, enquadrada através do Despacho n.º 9126/2022, de 26 de julho. O estudo assenta num questionário dirigido a jovens, que visa recolher informação sobre a situação no mercado de trabalho e as representações e perceções acerca da segurança social. Esta pesquisa é, todavia, independente e cientificamente autónoma das análises e das perspetivas desenvolvidas pela Comissão.   Os dados foram recolhidos entre 12 de dezembro de 2022 e 29 de janeiro de 2023, através de um inquérito online, através de uma amostra bola de neve, que beneficiou de contactos institucionais e de redes sociais. A amostra, após a validação da base de dados, é de 5.077 jovens, com idades compreendidas entre os 18 e os 35 anos com uma distribuição relativamente uniforme em termos etários. Da análise dos resultados irá ser produzido um livro coletivo e espera-se a elaboração de outras publicações.      

The CATALYST project “European VET Excellence Centre for Leading Sustainable Systems and Business Transformation” is designed with strong vision and motivation to contribute to realisation of the European Green Deal and the new Industrial and SME Strategies. The main goal is with the establishment of united CATALYST Centre of Vocational excellence in 5 countries to give support, create an educational offer to tackle personal and organisational development, and to embrace transformation in SMEs, enabling and inspiring them to re-think and re-design their business models, co-creating and sharing between educational and business organisations. The project fosters innovation and applied knowledge in approaches of learning and tailor-made VET program via the “Enable component”, as well as support of SMEs to create sustainable businesses via the “Inspire component”. The main project outputs are: 1. 5 CoVEs and CATALYST Network anchored the European VET eco-system; 2. 70 VET courses for up-skilling professionals and students; 3.Co-create and disseminate applied knowledge inspiring business-education partnerships involving students, professionals and SMEs; 4. Create CATALYST Platform which will unite all CoVEs on a European level; 5. Implement VET trainings, pilot-project with SMEs and applied joint research projects in selected sectors according to the national S3; 6. Raise awareness of the potential CATALYST CoVEs have and increase the demand and attractiveness of VET. Activities are focused on learning opportunities, applied joint research projects, innovative training methodologies and tools and support for SMEs on relevant topics, where more than 5000 beneficiaries (professionals, students and SMEs) can benefit. The desired impact of the project is the established CoVEs to be ‘catalyst’ on national, regional and European level, ‘enable’ change and ‘inspire’ and transformation of individuals and SMEs toward more sustainable systems and societies.

A growing body of comparative political economy literature argues that western countries are increasingly dualised. According to this strand, the gap between workers is expanding. Some workers are covered by collective agreements, have standard contracts and have access to standard social protection, while others hold atypical contracts, have access to a second-tier welfare state and are not covered by collective agreements. This dualisation process results from labour legislation reforms that allowed the spread of atypical contracts; welfare state reforms, that allowed the creation of residual, income-tested, and in-work benefits for some individuals; and collective bargaining reforms that eroded collective bargaining coverage. The covid-19 pandemic has made even clearer the need to rethink these divisions, which are characterised by the existence of winners and losers. The guiding question of this project is: under which conditions can dualisation be overcome and solidarity fostered? The project focusses on one key dimension of dualisation: the regulation and use of atypical contracts, i.e. fixed-term contracts, self-employment and agency work. From our perspective, the type of contract is a key element of dualisation, and is of paramount importance to explain labour market inequalities and the disintegration of solidarity in the sphere of work. Thus, when speaking about reforms that foster solidarity, we mean inclusive reforms that improve the protection provided by atypical contracts. The main argument of the project is that fostering solidarity involves three levels of action: labour law (national), collective bargaining (meso and micro) and workplace-level arrangements (micro). Labour law plays a decisive role in establishing the conditions under which atypical contracts can be used. Collective agreements are important because they can define better (or worse) conditions than those established in the labour code regarding the use of atypical contracts. And it ...

The Youth Employment Observatory (OEJ) is part of the DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte (Centre for Studies on Socio-Economic Change and the Territory) and is funded by FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology. The OEJ aims to create a repository of content and research dedicated exclusively to the youth labour market, taking advantage of synergies and spaces for interaction between DINÂMIA'CET’s research projects dedicated to studying labour. (See “partnerships” for information on the research projects currently underway). The Observatory focuses on three areas of study - youth unemployment, quality of youth employment, and labour market policies directed at young labour market participants. The project's central objective is to produce publications that highly impact society, namely reports and policy briefs, and to provide regularly updated key data.

Are employers active players in the process of nurturing and driving skill supply by younger university graduates? And how do they interact with Universities in shaping graduates' skills? Firms rely upon timely availability of skills to compete and grow, while workers depend on their skills to access jobs and, more importantly, high quality jobs. The purpose of this research programme (RP) is to examine employers' strategies to access the skills they need by either recruiting skilled employees from the labour market (LM) or by training their internal labour force. This choice reflects the make-or-buy alternative typical of all production factors, yet the centrality of human resources and the uncertainty surrounding the outcomes of programmes targeted at their development turn this choice into a critical driver of firm survival. Due to the crucial roles played by graduates from higher education (HE) institutions in shaping growth and innovation processes, this RP focuses on HE under- and post-graduates. When do employers prefer ready-to-work over ready-to learn graduates? What individual characteristics encourage internal training? Which solutions may support university-to-work transitions and consequently reduce or avoid skill problems? The underlying assumption is that the match between skill demand and skill supply depends on the ability of HE institutions to provide students with appropriate skills but also on firms' human resource policies and practices. To account for the intertwined roles of HE institutions and employers this RP explores both anticipative and remedial strategies and pursues five specific goals: 1) identify the employability skills for younger HE graduates in national and international LMs; 2) examine firms' strategies to access and develop required skills; 3) explore employers' expectations from HE institutions; 4) explore how employers' skill policies affect job quality of younger graduates; and 5) explore the relationship between HE and firm...

This project addresses the transformations of the employment regime that took place in Portugal in the context of global economic restructuring of the last decades and its onsequences in respect to employment and work. The deleterious impacts on work of the growing internationalization of production and concomitant financialisation have been salient in a country vulnerable to delocalization of production, macroeconomic imbalances and indebtedness. These impacts reached their zenith with the Global Financial Crisis and ensuing "troika" financial bail-out in 2011. At the time a reconfiguration of employment regime aimed at internal devaluation was spelled out in the troika's Memoradum and implemented, affecting institutions and rules governing employment protection, working time arrangements, unemployment benefits and collective bargaining. Building on previous research that characterized the institutional reconfiguration associated with internal devaluation as a regressive one that amounted to a transfer of income from labor to capital and to a change of power resources unfavorable to organized labor, the project intends to broaden this research in two different ways. First, it extends the assessment of devaluation of work to key dimensions of the quality of employment and working conditions that might have been directly deteriorated as a result of the reconfiguration of employment regime (in particular wages, working time and job security). Second, by analyzing actors' strategies and power resources at national, sector, and company level it pin points long term consequences of internal devaluation its drivers, and means to counteract them. The project conjectures that the institutional reconfiguration of the Portuguese employment regime and internal devaluation may have accelerated a process of cumulative devaluation of work involving loss of competences and skills, investment retrenchment, increasing inequalities, and demographic decay, whose relations and drivers ...

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This project aimed to investigate into detail the living conditions of individuals hit by the crisis and to understand with their cooperation how they coped with the economic shock they experienced or are still experiencing. Methodology: The work sought to: Identify the more recent studies in Portugal about this subject; A brief characterization of the phenomena of unemployment in the recent 5 years; An Identification of the interviewees on the basis of the criteria provided by the Coordinator as laid out in the methodological framework for the interviews; The realisations of 15 the face-to-face interviews to understand how people have been impacted by the crisis with the guidelines provided by the Coordinator; A word transcription of the interviews in the original language and in English; Analyze and summarize the main findings of the interview elaborating a report.

Who benefited most from the re-regulation of labour markets which affected most of EU countries in the 1990s? The guidelines of the European Employment Strategy stress the need to promote flexibility combined with employment security and to ensure employment-friendly labour cost developments and wage-setting mechanisms [Ce05]. Despite higher occupation and employment rates, the outcome of 20 years of labour market flexibility is not clear yet. Flexibility allowed employers to face increasingly competitive markets, yet claims exist that contract flexibility was also used to cut labour and training costs [RaScHa00]. Contract flexibility has also been accused of driving large shares of younger workers and other groups of disadvantages employees to career paths characterised by temporary contracts, lower wages, poor working conditions, and low training. Literature on employment relationships has achieved important results, but several gaps still exist. The core idea of this research project is that wage dynamics and the use of flexible contracts are driven by the wage policy of a firm and by environmental conditions. Thus, the research programme jointly developed by a Portuguese and an Italian research unit, will take advantage of two national administrative linked employer-employee panel databases: Quadros do Pessoal, and Work Histories Italian Panel (WHIP). The research programme is based on a multidisciplinary, comparative, and pluralist approach and it is expected to produce new theoretical models and empirical evidence on the joint use of contract flexibility and targeted wage policies by firms.

The Project provided an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of the phenomenon of domestic work, including some new empirical research. It mainly concerned the nature of the legal regulation of domestic work and domestic workers, contextualized by socio-legal and socio-economic analysis. Its focus is on law and society, including the impact of changes in the law on society, and encompassed both issues arising from domestic work and issues concerning domestic workers. The Project is focused on Portugal, where there has been no study of the legal implications of the nature of domestic work and the employment relationship, the identity of the workers, or the wider impact of the commodification of such domestic work. It will also consider, in a comparison, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India and Mozambique.