The return of mass unemployment?
This text discusses, from a critical perspective, the cumulative and impactful effects that could result from the current pandemic. It attempts to go beyond the numbers, using essentially qualitative data, obtained through interviews carried out before the crisis broke out, as well as information gathered through a panel of cases being monitored regularly during the crisis. The results, which are still provisional, point in two directions. On the one hand, the measures implemented will not be enough to prevent an explosion in unemployment. On the other hand, the first victims are beginning to emerge: the immediately unemployed, a group made up of precarious workers and workers whose employment relationships are more fragile. This group could be joined by two others: the previously unemployed and the procrastinated unemployed.
After having been a "non-issue" in recent years, mass unemployment is in danger of once again becoming a problem, indeed the problem, which the country will have to tackle through effective public policies and for everyone. It concludes with the need to act quickly on policies to mobilize the necessary resources to prevent the usual inevitabilities - poverty and social exclusion - from taking over our collective future.
Authors: Jorge Caleiras, Renato Miguel do Carmo.
