I return once again to the theme of the Labor XXI draft, the ill-fated attempt to carry out social reengineering, which is worth remembering, was never announced in the electoral manifestos of any party that competed in the 2025 legislative elections.
I will not repeat that this attempt at reengineering seems to be tailored to the desires of those who want easier dismissals, more precarious contracts, young people to emigrate or platform workers without the right to a dignified life. Or my special concern that with this draft, young people, our children, will be precarious their entire lives. I repeat, all my life.
I also find the claims that companies’ productivity will increase with this preliminary project laughable, an argument to which I will return in due course.
For now I would like to devote some of your attention to the argument I have heard that the Labor Code is a piece of legislation coming out of the PREC, stale, originating from a totalitarian vision of society. Nothing less true.
The Labor Code is a product of the mandate of the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Dr. António Bagão Félix, Secretary of State and Minister several times. It was during the XV Constitutional Government, with a PSD/CDS majority, at the time of Dr. José Manuel Durão Barroso as Prime Minister.
As is his tone, Dr. Bagão Félix has built a reputation as an excellent technician and a man with a humanistic vision and who believes in the centrality of work for people’s dignity.
The Labor Code, for many years pejoratively called the “Bagão Félix code” by the political left, dates back to 2003 (Law No. 99/2003). It was the subject of 26 legislative revisions, of different scope and effects, issued by the Assembly of the Republic, the largest of them during the time of the Troika, culminating in an international financial crisis and the illusion of the Portuguese political leadership, at the time, that the “debts were not worth paying”.
The Labor Code is a recent piece of legislation, created by a humanist, from a majority right-wing government, and the subject of successive revisions (always in favor of capital and not people). No one can want to make us believe that Dr. Bagão Félix is a dangerous communist or that his Code is something stuffy from the 70s of the last century.
As I am the son of a captain from April (and November), I write this text in the week that marks the day when the moderate captains established the Freedom that April had made us dream of. No one, really no one, can deceive the Portuguese. The Labor Code is a child of April, but also of November. It’s anything but a PREC thing.
President of SNQTB