Solidarity in Hard Times

Abstract

This chapter deals with solidarity towards those made more vulnerable due to less security in employment and degraded social protection during hard times. 1 Stable, long-term employment paying a living wage shrunk over previous decades, as shortterm, unstable, poorly paid jobs spread. Higher insecurity and instability affected standard and temporary employment, the latter rising everywhere. Particularly in segmentation-prone Birmarckian systems, such as the Portuguese, where social security is closely linked with enduring labour market participation, rising precarity in atypical employment (averaging 21 per cent from 2000 to 2018) is often compounded by weak or spotty social protection. The twin fragmentation of work and breakdown of the standard employment relation brought about a 'precarious periphery' and a 'destabilization of the stable' (Castel, 2003; 2007), accompanied by widespread 'privatization of risk' in the labour market and social protection due to increasing social and economic risk shifts from government and employers onto ordinary individuals and their families (Hacker, 2006).These trends did not start with the Great Recession; they have prevailed for some time in advanced industrial economies, but found in crisis policymaking under conditionality an opportunity to evade constraints that hitherto had tamed or 'embedded' them. Looking at the Portuguese case, we study weather and how domestic politics and institutions mattered to counteract the dualisation, precarisation, and liberalising trends in employment relations and social protection during the Great Recession and beyond.1 We thank Julia López López and her leadership on the Project on Solidarity for supporting this research and convening several Seminars on 'Solidarity under the Perspective of Labour Law', concluding with 'Inscribing Solidarity: Labor Law and Beyond', held at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), and all participants for their warm support and pointed and insightful comments. Research was supported also by IPRI-NOVA FCT fund (UIDB/04627/2020).