The next CIES research workshop will take place on June 23, 2025, between 12:00 p.m. and 1:30 p.m., in room B226 of Building 4 (Iscte-Knowledge and Innovation).
This initiative takes place within the context of the Inequality, Work, and Social Well-being Research Group.

PRESENTATION
Sara Franco da Silva
PhD Fellow at CIES-Iscte

COMMENTARY
Nuno Nunes
Researcher at CIES-Iscte

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the initial results of the ongoing doctoral project – “Decent Work and Social Inequalities in the Digital Society.” The research aims to characterize citizens’ living and working conditions, adopting an international comparative perspective (between European countries) and an intranational perspective (between Portuguese municipalities). The study begins with the recognition that we live in an era marked by structural “transformative changes” that accentuate the polarization between a minority of beneficiaries—a global elite of “winners”—and a growing majority of workers in precarious or marginalised situations—the “losers.” In this context, the Decent Work Agenda, proposed by the International Labor Organization (ILO), is a fundamental theoretical and political reference point. This agenda seeks to inform critical reflection and political action to combat the processes of intensive deregulation of labour relations and the erosion of social rights that have been won, offering a normative framework for the promotion of equitable and sustainable working conditions.

Within the framework of this issue, this research proposes a system of indicators for monitoring the different dimensions of decent work, with the potential for application at different scales and in different territorial contexts.

The international analysis is based on microdata from the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS, Eurofound, 2022), allowing for comparison between European countries based on indicators that capture objective and subjective dimensions of decent work. Descriptive and multivariate statistical analyses were carried out—including cluster analysis and multiple linear regressions—to deepen the intersections between experiences and perceptions of decent work and different vectors of inequality: categorical (gender, age group, class) and distributive (economic and educational resources). At the national level, decent work conditions were mapped at the municipal level, based on indicators produced by the National Statistics Institute (INE). This analysis aims to explore the territorial diversity of working conditions in Portugal, identifying patterns and asymmetries and examining their intersections with different forms of social inequality.

The objective of this session is to promote a critical debate on the quality and scope of the statistical indicators used to monitor decent work in Portugal and in European countries, discussing the extent to which they are able to reflect and map the different theoretical dimensions that constitute this multidimensional concept.