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 idea of the project is to excel entrepreneurship education in higher education by creating effective knowledge alliances (KA) between higher education institutions (HEI) and businesses. It is focused on developing students’ entrepreneurship competencies (ECs) to meet the labor market expectations towards professional competencies of employees and entrepreneurs taking into account the macro-level developments such as globalization, technological advancements and demographic shifts. The project includes both diagnoses of divergences between employers’ needs and actual students’ entrepreneurship competences (ECs), proposition of the new entrepreneurship education (EE) framework embedding ECs together with innovative teaching and learning approaches and its application in practice. The novelty of the project is connected with a combination of university and business resources in order to provide both theory grounded and practice oriented EE aimed at strengthening the development ECs of target groups (students, employees, teaching staff, entrepreneurs) in changing and developing business environment. Inclusive character of the project is guaranteed by cooperation of diverse partners interested in different but innovative teaching and learning approaches for students and future workforce with competences meeting societal challenges. The Project includes new and innovative tools and teaching and learning opportunities, which are different from the existing experiences in HEI and businesses today. These include: self-assessment tools to assess the level and need for ECs according to societal needs; new innovative study and training programs relying on entrepreneurship competence-based approach; innovative teaching and learning approaches based on embedding the development of ECs in EE and subject-specific courses; roadmap for the development of expansive entrepreneurial learning environment at the workplaces supporting ECs development. The project is focused on providi...

Developing Competences for Stress Resilience @SMEs (DeSTRESS) aims to provide an innovative VET-based solution to this problem. Building on existing research, partners will develop a VET curriculum supported by an innovative VET Digital Training Platform using the latest techniques in game-based training and gamification, complemented by a set of practical tools and resources to facilitate the transfer of learning into the workplace. This environment will expose the main psychosocial health risks and their real impact on the individuals’ life and on the companies’ productivity. Players will assume roles, enabling them to think back on their experiences with these specific situations and how it happened, and which solutions are available for each scenario. Besides raising awareness on the problem, the project outputs will enable owner, managers and even decision makers to plan for and to mitigate its occurrence and the negative consequences of work- based stress. For that purpose, both a policy report and recommendations will be produced. A network of facilitators will also be created as an open forum to debate these issues. As such, the project will contribute to strengthening key digital competences in initial VET while preventing the inherent hazards. 

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 ...