Figure 1 shows that people in the bottom quartile of income from wages (quartile 1) worked, on average, fewer hours per week than people in the other quartiles. In 2019, the number of hours worked in quartile 1 was the highest in the third quarter, which is likely related to a high prevalence of seasonal jobs among this group. In contrast, the average weekly number of hours worked declined 37 minutes between the second and third quarters of 2020. This may be related to the severe contraction in the activity of the tourism sector induced by the pandemic. 

Single-parent households were the most affected. In the third quarter of 2020, an adult in one of these households worked 4% fewer hours than in the same quarter of 2019. Before the pandemic, the difference in hours worked by men and women in single-parent households was over 5 hours; a year later, in the first quarter of 2021, the difference was only 1 hour and 16 minutes. This was mainly due to a drop of almost 10% in the number of hours worked by men who are single parents, as seen in Figure 2.

Registrations in public employment centres increased with the pandemic, interrupting the pre-pandemic downward trend. Between February and December 2020, registrations increased 28% (from 293 thousand to 375 thousand). In 2021, registrations declined in May but were still well above those of 2019. Typically, individuals with secondary education account for the bulk of registrations, as shown in Figure 3. This is the group with the highest absolute and relative increase between February and December 2020 (57 thousand and 30%, respectively).

The Algarve region experienced the greatest increase in enrolments during the pandemic vis-à-vis the same quarters of 2019, as shown in Figure 4. Importantly, Algarve is the region of Portugal where jobs most often rely on tourism, which, jointly with the changes in confinement measures, explains the U-shape of the graph from June 2020 onwards. The Lisboa e Vale do Tejo region also experienced an increase in enrolments compared to 2019, albeit to a smaller (and less seasonal) extent than the Algarve.

The pandemic induced different types of transitions in the labour market. The percentage of people who went from being employed in 2019 to unemployed or inactive in 2020 was higher than between 2018 and 2019, as shown in Figure 5. The increase in transitions from employed to unemployed peaked in the third quarter of 2020, with twice as many workers becoming unemployed between 2019 and 2020 than between 2018 and 2019. The transition to inactivity peaked early in 2020. Three times more workers were employed in the second quarter of 2019 but inactive in the second quarter of 2020 than in the same quarters of 2018 and 2019.

The average wage increased 53€ between the first quarters of 2020 and 2021. As Figure 6 shows, in the first quarter of 2020, there was a greater concentration of workers earning lower wages, compared to the same period in 2021. To interpret this figure, it is important to note that as employment decreased, there were workers (and wages) that appeared in 2020 and not in 2021 (and vice versa, to a lesser extent). Therefore, the rightward shift in the wage distribution should not necessarily be interpreted as an increase in the wage earned by each worker, but as an indication of job destruction in the left tail of the wage distribution.

Between 2019 and 2020, the number of temporary contracts declined—22% less in the second quarter of 2020 vis-à-vis the same period of 2019 (Table 1). This trend remains in subsequent quarters, but the increase in permanent contracts is never enough to offset the reduction in the temporary ones, which stresses that job destruction was concentrated in precarious contracts. 

Remote work became a highly popular instrument to compensate for the mobility restrictions stemming from the pandemic. However, the ability to work remotely is not the same for all occupations. At the beginning of the pandemic, more than 40% of workers with higher education were working from home in Portugal, compared to just 2% of workers without basic education and 11% of workers with secondary education (Figure 7). The workers with lower levels of education, either risked their health and kept working as before, or were furloughed or laid off. In all cases, remote working declined in the remaining quarters of 2020, to increase in the first quarter of 2021, as new mobility restrictions were implemented, except for workers with a low level of education. The prevalence of remote working across education levels did not change. 

Carvalho, B., Nunes, C., Peralta, S., Pereira dos Santos, J. e Tavares, J. (2021). Failing young and temporary workers: The impact of covid-19 on a dual labour market. Mimeo.
Cho, J. S., Lee, J. Y. e Winters, J. V. (2020). “Employment Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic across Metropolitan Status and Size”. Institute of Labor Economics, IZA Discussion Papers, nº 13468. 
Kikuchi, S., Kitao, S. e Mikoshiba, M. (2021). “Who suffers from the COVID-19 shocks? Labor market heterogeneity and welfare consequences in Japan”. Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 59:101117. issn: 0889-1583. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jjie.2020.101117. 
Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional (2021). Estatísticas mensais dos serviços públicos de emprego. www.iefp.pt/estatisticas
Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE). EU - Labour Force Survey microdata. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/microdata/european-union-labour-force-survey