Official unemployment figures as calculated by Statistics Portugal are considerably lower than those calculated by the Employment and Vocational Training Institute as a result of different approaches to who is counted as unemployed.
Around 500 collective agreements affecting local authority workers are waiting to be recognised by the government, which recently extended the working week from 35 to 40 hours without compensation. The trade unions and municipalities see this reluctance as a violation of the Portuguese Constitution
In August 2014, the British and Portuguese trade union confederations, the TUC and CGTP-IN, signed a cooperation protocol to ensure that Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking migrant workers in the UK can join unions and enforce their rights at work. The new agreement is intended to prevent
In 2014, Portugal's Constitutional Court ruled that a number of the coalition government's austerity measures were unconstitutional. The government’s response was a new austerity package that extended the possibility of wage cuts to 2018 and included permanent cuts to public pensions. The
After the troika intervention ended in Portugal in May 2014, important changes were made to employment rules. These allow companies to dismiss workers for ‘unsuitability’, and companies in crisis to suspend collective agreements. They also reduce the period for which expired collective agreements