Crisis and Work: An Analysis of Emergency Labour Market Policies in Portugal, Spain and Greece

In this article, we analyse the main reforms introduced in the Portuguese, Spanish and Greek labour-markets since the beginning of the crisis. Based in a documental and statistical analysis, the study takes in consideration the similar institutional, historical and geographic characteristics of these countries, but also their particularities. Results show that the emergency policies tend to resemble and to concentrate on dismissals, contracts, working time, salaries, collective bargaining and working conditions in the public sector. Nonetheless, the pre-crisis structural variations between these countries, together with the different effects that the crisis had in each one of them, help to understand possible differences in terms of results, giving a new contribution to the questioning of the internal homogeneity of the Mediterranean model.