Flexibility of Work during the Pandemic: The Cases of Greece and Portugal

The Eurozone crisis posed a severe challenge for the European periphery. The European Commission introduced new mechanisms to improve the economic conditions in the failing countries, with a specific focus on conditionalities to enhance productivity and competitiveness. Precisely, European Stability Mechanism (ESM) strengthened the relationship between structural adjustment programmes and conditionalities. There existed a direct correlation between conditionalities put forward for the release of loans to bailout economies and implementation of structural adjustment policies in the European periphery. These conditionalities mainly involved reforms to restructure the production relations with mechanisms to increase efficiency and productivity of labour. Peripheral economies implemented comprehensive reforms aiming to increase the flexibility of work, which had important repercussions on deregulation of production relations. Just after the bailout countries exited their structural adjustment programmes, there happened the covid-19 outbreak with further challenges to economic wellbeing. It brought certain limitations to working relations with irregular practices of telework, short-time and part-time work, temporary work and subcontracted work. In this sense, covid-19 labour policies functioned to consolidate the post-crisis flexibilisation processes with further adjustments in production relations. Although the post-covid 19 flexibilisation happened as an unexpected imperative on the economy, it continued the post-crisis labour policies in the European periphery. This paper aims to present a comparative analysis of two bailout countries that engaged in structural adjustment programmes under ESM: Greece and Portugal. It intends to offer an inquiry into the coverage of conditionalities on flexibilisation of production relations. By doing this, it targets to uncover the relationship between the extent of conditionalities and the scope of change in the labour market indicators. The paper also presents how Greece and Portugal faced the covid-19 outbreak in terms of the flexibilisation of production relations. The paper compares the labour market indicators in telework, short-time and part-time work, temporary work and subcontracted work since their entrance to the ESM programme. It aims to highlight that flexibilisation policies has been in increase in terms of coverage and extent in both Greece and Portugal. It argues that post-covid 19 policies of labour market flexibilisation presented a major step towards consolidating flexibilisation of production relations in Greece and Portugal.