Portugal's social partners are back at the table today, six weeks after the labour law fell
Portugal's Standing Committee for Social Concertation meets at 3pm in Lisbon — the first time since Parliament rejected the labour reform. On the agenda: wages, the Labour Compensation Fund, and the thing nobody listed.
The government, the employers and the unions are back in the same room this afternoon, for the first time since Parliament threw out the labour reform. Portugal’s Standing Committee for Social Concertation sits at 3pm at the Economic and Social Council in Lisbon, and everyone will politely pretend the main subject isn’t on the agenda.
What is on the agenda at Portugal’s social concertation meeting?
Two items, officially. The first is a check-up on the 2025-2028 tripartite deal on pay rises and economic growth — are the agreed increases actually landing on payslips at the promised pace? The second is the Labour Compensation Fund, whose withdrawal window closes at the end of this year with hundreds of millions still sitting in it; we’ve written up how companies can claim that money back before the door shuts.
Will the labour reform actually come up?
Not on paper. In practice, it can’t not. The bill was rejected at first reading by Chega and the left, leaving the government with nine months of negotiation and no obvious road out — which is exactly the question we left hanging when the labour law was voted down.
Labour minister Maria do Rosário Palma Ramalho keeps calling the reform inevitable, and points out that reviewing labour legislation was written into the wage agreement the partners themselves signed. It’s a neat argument: if the review is part of the deal already on the table, then raising it here isn’t opening a new front, it’s finishing an old one.
What do the unions and employers want?
The UGT was accused of intransigence when talks curdled in May, and it has said more than once that it doesn’t take ultimatums. Luís Montenegro, meanwhile, has refused to let the deadlock drag on forever and promised to sit down with the partners again. Put the two together and you have the mood of the afternoon: nobody wants to be the first to walk out, and nobody wants to be the first to blink.
One thing worth holding on to — social concertation doesn’t pass laws. What comes out of a meeting like this is political pressure and a read on who might move. After a defeat in Parliament, that’s precisely what a government goes shopping for. The official agenda and minutes live on the Economic and Social Council’s site.
Image: Governo de Portugal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
