Young Workers’ Perceptions of Trade Unions in Portugal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper seeks to capture how unions are perceived by young workers in Portugal and to identify different types of perceptions. Our analysis considers both structural factors and subjective experiences and is based on semi-structured interviews with young people working in sectors with a high concentration of youth employment. The fact that young workers are increasingly exposed to the pressures of unemployment and precarious work might suggest that there is homogeneity in their perceptions about trade unions and collective action. However, our results show that young workers’ perceptions are not homogenous and that they interconnect with distinct segments, characterized by different socio-economic conditions, as defined by family status, education level and position in the labour market. Three types of perceptions were identified by content analysis of the interviews: positive, negative and critical perceptions. A final segment of younger and less-skilled workers, of families with low educational and economic resources and having left school prematurely, have neither information nor any understanding about unions. Our findings support the thesis that diversity of educational and early labour market experiences, which characterize transition processes to adulthood, shape the relation between young workers and unions, in particular the motivation to join unions. Capturing the diversity of young workers experiences and perceptions is a challenge to industrial relations research, as well as to trade unionism. It can provide unions with important insights into how to adapt their strategies to recruit new young members and to mobilize the latent interests of young workers in collective action.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".