The Activation of Employment Policies and the Dissemination of Insecure Jobs. The Case of a Southern European Country

The 2008 great recession has had major impacts in the functioning of Southern European labour markets. Since then issues of massive, structural unemployment, inactivity, long-term unemployment, and other, related with precarious forms of employment, exclusion and discrimination, became a central concern for politicians and were given particular attention by social scientists. In this paper, I show that the effects of the downgrading of conditions of work and protection need to be articulated with the particular characteristics and the trajectory of social protection systems. My analysis is focused on one of the countries where the effects of the crisis were deeply felt in the economy and in the labour market. Characterized, after the work of Maurizio Ferrera (1996), as one of the welfare states belonging to the Southern European welfare model, Portugal was more recently included in the depreciative list of countries known as “PIGS”. As it happened in these other countries (that is Ireland, Greece and Spain), and perhaps in a less intensive manner in most advanced capitalist societies, Portugal has been constrained by the implementation of structural reforms and budget cuts programs with impacts on the structure of work and the social protection system. I aim to examine, in particular, the activation trend in employment policy and its interrelationship with the dissemination of insecure forms of work and sparse and intermittent welfare provision. Admitting that activation is one central tendency affecting all welfare systems, I intend to discuss its meanings and trace its recent developments in Portugal. My hypothesis is that, in the case of Portugal, the focus on individuals’ responsibilities and capacities of managing their own employability, among other ingredients of active employment policies, is closely related with a new role performed by the state. Along with the obligation to enhance the employability, namely of benefits’ claimants, the Portuguese welfare system is contributing to the dissemination of new forms of labour market participation and ways of accessing social protection. Institutions, such as the Public Employment Services, impose a new set of “rights and obligations”, and, at the same time, contribute, trough their programs and strategies, to shape “new”, flexible employment conditions and, until a certain extent, to the (re)production of short-term jobs, under insecure and scarce social protection. Since my focus is on this particular field of intervention, the article thus not provide sufficient empirical nor theoretical evidence to assume that the gap between, in this case, the Southern European welfare regime (through one of its members) and the other regimes is somehow narrowing. Even so, my point is that a mixture of convergence towards some distinctive common traits and historicity is being consolidated, contributing to a continuing transformation of the social welfare edifice and to shape new ways of building social relationships.