Os efeitos da pandemia de Covid 19 e a precariedade na grande distribuição

Abstract

With the Covid 19 pandemic appearing in Portugal in March 2019, the government had to adopt confinement measures that resulted in the loss of jobs. Thus, the objective of this dissertation is to understand which type of job was most affected by the pandemic and to analyze its impact on the large distribution sector. Based on the research objectives, we used, in this work, two different approaches, one quantitative and the other qualitative. By using different databases, the first exercise consists in analyzing economic variables, such as GDP and the unemployment rate, starting in 2019, the year in which the pandemic impacted Portugal. Thus, we demonstrate that from 2019 onwards there was a downturn in the Portuguese economy, resulting from a pandemic crisis. In the quantitative exercise, we’ve also considered surveys that suggest that those most affected by the pandemic were previously the most precarious individuals. This precariousness results from the employment conditions to which they are exposed, such as indefinite contracts, flexibility in terms of working hours and functions and insufficient or irregular income. We also found, in interviews’ results, that workers severely faced these conditions during the pandemic. The impact of the Covid 19 pandemic has been especially abrupt for precarious workers, which includes workers in the large distribution sector.

Date of Award	13 Jul 2022
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Carlos Eduardo Soares de Seixas (Supervisor) & Sandra Lima Coelho (Co-Supervisor)