Flexibility of Work During the Pandemic: The Cases of Portugal and Greece

Introduction

Global economy has gone through important transitions in the past several decades. The need for a change in economic policy based on the falling rates of profits (Bullock & Yaffe, 1988; Savran, 1988; Wright, 1988) from the early 1970s and the end of bipolar world in the 1980s have introduced neoliberal economic values as the hegemonic policies (Harvey, 2005) in the developed and the developing world. 20^th century global capitalist relations of production have been consolidated over the principles of international trade, transnational production, and global division of labour (O’Brian & Williams, 2016). This change has intensified the competition among national economies, industries, and firms. Capital has inclined towards more inclusive surplus-value strategies and strengthened the discipline mechanisms on labour (Bonefeld, 1996). Hence, the conflict between capital and labour on the extraction of surplus-value has been carried to the global platform.

As the national and regional economies have become comparatively more interdependent in time, recent economic crises such as 1994 Mexican crisis, 1997 Asian crisis, 2001 Argentinian crisis had great impacts on global markets. Likewise, 2008 global economic crisis, originated in the US mortgage market, had important repercussions on national economies all over the globe. It also posed a severe challenge for the EU and its member states in the form of the Eurozone crisis (Sarımehmet Duman, 2014; Ioannou, Leblond, & Niemann, 2015; Warren, 2017).

The European Commission introduced new mechanisms in the failing countries, with a specific focus on economic restructuring to improve economic indicators. The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) strengthened the relationship between structural adjustment programmes and conditionalities (Sarımehmet Duman, 2020). There existed a direct correlation between conditionalities put forward for the release of loans to bailout economies and implementation of structural adjustment policies in the European periphery. These conditionalities mainly involved reforms to restructure the production relations with mechanisms to increase efficiency and productivity of labour (ESM, 2017). Peripheral economies, especially the bailout countries benefited from the ESM such as Ireland, Cyprus, Portugal, and Greece, implemented comprehensive reforms aiming to increase the flexibility of work, and hence, to bring their levels of competitiveness to the level of core economies. These reforms had important repercussions on deregulation of production relations and structurally changed the relationship between labour and capital. Thus, the aim of the ESM had gone beyond improving the economic indicators and meant to have long-term structural effects on these economies. The bailout countries started to restructure their productive markets towards the target of boosting competitiveness (Sarımehmet Duman, 2020).

Just after the bailout countries exited their structural adjustment programmes, there happened the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak with further challenges to economic wellbeing. COVID-19 started to spread through the world from December 2019, and took markets and societies under its influence from February 2020. World Health Organization (WHO) called this new situation as a ‘pandemic’, which generated a big challenge for countries in economic, political, and social terms.

The COVID-19 crisis had important implications on the labour market. Quarantine policies spread the implementation of atypical forms of work such as short-time and part-time work, telework, temporary work and subcontracted work (ILO, 2020). These flexible forms of work caused increasing number of job losses and further limited the labour’s social benefits (Sankaran, 2020). In that respect, COVID-19 labour policies functioned to consolidate the post-crisis flexibilisation processes with further adjustments in production relations. Although the post-COVID-19 flexibilisation happened as an unexpected imperative on the economy, it continued the post-crisis labour policies in the European periphery.