The evolution of Portuguese trade unionism: Political economies and power resources

• Published date: 01 May 2021
• Author: Hugo Dias
• Date: 01 May 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12328

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The evolution of Portuguese trade unionism:

Political economies and power resources

Hugo Dias

Institute of Economics, State University

of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

Correspondence

Hugo Dias, Institute of Economics, State

University of Campinas, Campinas

13083-970, Brazil.

Email: hugodias@unicamp.br

Funding information

Foundation for Science and Technology,

Grant/Award Number: PTDC/IVC-

SOC/3533/2014-POCI-01-0145-ERDF-

016808

Abstract

The present work set out to study the evolution of Por-

tuguese trade unionism, by articulating the different

cycles of economic growth of the country and their

respective political economies with the impacts on the

development of its power resources. The study is

divided into four parts: first, it gives an overview of the

economy, labour relations and trade unionism; the

second part analyses the process of asymmetric

European integration and the implementation of the

austerity policies (2011–2015); the third part studies the

political cycle between 2015 and 2019, the so-called

Contraption; finally, some preliminary considerations

are advanced.

1|INTRODUCTION

The present work set out to study the evolution of Portuguese trade unionism, by articulating

the different cycles of economic growth of the country and their respective political economies

with the impacts on the development of its power resources. For that purpose, two main

theoretical bodies of literature contribute to this. On the one hand, the set of approaches that

seeks to characterise the patterns of countries' economic and political development and their

insertion in the world economy. It has been, mainly for peripheral countries, particularly fertile

the cross between the reference framework of the School of Regulation and subsequent

theorizations of Varieties of Capitalisms with the structuring notions of World-Economy of

World-systems Theory coined by Immanuel Wallerstein (Arrighi, 1985; Gambarotto &

Solari, 2015; Santos, 1993; Santos & Reis, 2018). More concretely, it will be used, in economic

The article was written and submitted before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

DOI: 10.1111/irj.12328

© 2021 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ind. Relat. 2021;52:237–254. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/irj 237

terms, the periodisation described by Reis (2018) that identifies five different cycles of economic

growth since the 1960s.

Portugal is historically an intermediate or semi-peripheral development society inserted in

the European context (Santos, 1993). Together with the other countries of the southern

European periphery—Spain, Greece and Italy—they would constitute a model of

Mediterranean Capitalism (Amable, 2003, 2005), having a Mediterranean model of Welfare

State (Castles, 1993; Ferrera, 1996, 2005) and a distinctive southern European employment

model (Karamessini, 2008). Whether one terminology is used or another, it is a group of

countries with their own historical configuration, with common historical and cultural charac-

teristics that allowed them to stand out from the central countries. The countries in question

have witnessed periods of splendour in European history but enter Western modernity in a

peripheral condition. These societies remain marked by agrarianism and clientele-dependent

relations with late economic modernization processes. The path towards political moderniza-

tion is also turbulent, with the 20th century marked by long periods of authoritarian regimes

and moments of polarized social and political conflict (Ferrera, 2005: pp. 3–4).

After the Second World War, they witness a dynamic of accelerated change. This occurs first

in Italy, but from the 1960s, it also reached the Iberian countries and Greece, culminating in

the mid-1970s, with these three countries' democratisation processes. However, just as they

begin to implement a broad set of social and employment policies, the Fordist wage relationship

and the universalist Welfare State are already in a crisis in advanced capitalist countries

(Santos, 1994). Adherence to the then European Economic Community (Italy is a founder) dur-

ing the 1980s (Greece in 1981, Spain and Portugal in 1986) contributed to an approximation, in

some aspects, of their social and economic structures to those of central European countries.

However, since the mid-1980s, the European Union has taken concrete steps in the process of

European integration by establishing a common market (1992) and, subsequently, an Economic

and Monetary Union (EMU) (1999), with effects on the peripheralisation of southern European

economies (Gambarotto & Solari, 2015; Rodrigues et al., 2016; Rodrigues & Reis, 2012; Santos &

Reis, 2018).

On the other hand, the second theoretical body of literature deployed in this study

originates from studies on labour relations and trade unionism. The economic, political and

institutional transformations that have taken place over the past three decades have produced a

global context that has a particularly adverse effect on union action. However, instead of taking

trade unionism as a passive onlooker of the current situation, union revitalisation studies are

producing an analysis sensitive to the specific context of union actions, but which emphasises

their ‘strategic capacity’and ‘organisational learning’(Hyman, 2007) and the dimensions and

strategies of revitalisation (Frege & Kelly, 2004). In the present case, we have chosen to use the

theoretical framework of power resources. This combines the notion of the strategic choice of

unions with the different power resources—structural, associational, institutional and

societal—at its disposal (Levesque & Murray, 2010; Schmalz et al., 2018; Schmalz

& Dorre, 2014).

Portuguese trade unionism, as in other southern European countries, also developed

counter-cyclically to what was happening in the central countries: (1) the period of collective

mobilisation of the 1960s and early 1970s was experienced under an authoritarian regime;

(2) in the second half of the 1970s, when tripartite social dialogue was the rule, Portuguese

trade unionism went through a time of greater capacity for mobilisation and collective action,

under the influence of a class discourse that advocated overcoming capitalism; and (3) finally,

from the 1980s the macroeconomic regulation mechanisms entered into crisis, the neoliberal

238 DIAS