This text discusses, from a critical perspective, the cumulative and impactful effects that may result from the current pandemic. It seeks to go beyond the numbers, primarily using qualitative data obtained through interviews conducted before the crisis erupted, as well as information gathered through the creation of a panel of cases under regular monitoring during the crisis. The results, still provisional, point in two directions. On the one hand, the measures implemented will not be sufficient to prevent an explosion of unemployment. On the other hand, the first victims are beginning to emerge: the immediately unemployed, a group composed of precarious workers and those with more precarious employment ties. Two other groups may join this: the anticipated unemployed and the procrastinated unemployed.
After being a "non-issue" in recent years, massive unemployment risks becoming a problem again, indeed, *the* problem, which the country will have to confront through effective public policies for all. This concludes with the need to act quickly on policies in order to mobilize the necessary resources to prevent the usual inevitabilities – poverty and social exclusion – from taking over our collective future.
Authors: Jorge Caleiras, Renato Miguel do Carmo.
