Os Overqualified workers with higher education received, on average, 36.8% less in 2023 than those whose functions correspond to their level of trainingaccording to a study, which also indicates that precariousness remains “very high” in the private sector.
“Overqualification among workers with higher education is associated with significant wage inequalities and different exposures to atypical employment relationships”, points out a study by the Collaborative Laboratory for Work, Employment and Social Protection (CoLABOR), which will be presented on Wednesday at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon.
According to the study, “in 2023, the average earnings of overqualified higher education graduates were 36.8% lower than those who had a profession adjusted to their educational qualifications.” He also adds that “those who are overqualified are more exposed to precarious contracts (27%)” compared to those who have a salary compatible with their qualifications.
There are also differences between the overqualification of the immigrant population and the indigenous population, with “the educational overqualification of the entire foreign population employed in the private sector in Portugal was, in 2023, 27.1% and 44.9% for the more restricted group of the foreign population employed with higher education”, that is, “values much higher than those found for the entire population employed in the private sector”, the authors state.
The study ‘Work, Employment and Social Protection 2025’ points out that contractual precariousness “remains very high in the private sector in Portugal” and in 2023 a third of private sector workers had non-permanent contracts, “a value that grows substantially in younger cohorts and in several municipalities in the country – with particular emphasis on those on the Alentejo coast and Algarve”.
Among the justifications found by the authors for these data is “the fact that non-permanent hiring is typically involuntary, that is, people accept working on fixed-term contracts because they have not found a job in which they were offered an open-ended contract”.
On the other hand, despite gender inequalities having been receding in recent years in the labor market, “considerable inequities still remain both in terms of opportunities and with regard to the remuneration gap”.
Thus, the study indicates that while women represent around 45% of full-time employment in the private sector, they only hold 36% of leadership positions and that women dominate management positions related to care, but are underrepresented in executive positions (28.4%), with the adjusted salary differential in this professional group reaching 21%.
The impacts of the climate transition on employment were other objects of analysis in this study, which indicates that ‘green’ jobs (those that contribute directly or indirectly to a low-carbon or net-zero carbon economy) have increased in absolute terms, but have decreased as a proportion of total employment.
In 2023 there were 463.4 thousand workers in the private sector in activities classified as green, 105.2 thousand more than in 2014 and representing 13.1% of total employment (that is, below the 14.6% recorded in 2010).
The analysis of ‘brown’ jobs shows a strong concentration of emissions: 80% of workers work in professions that represent only 15% of emissions, while the remaining 20% concentrate 85% of the total.
“This pattern shows that a small group of professions is responsible for the vast majority of emissions, making them especially exposed to greenhouse gas reduction policies”, highlights CoLABOR, in a statement, also pointing out that in total “it is estimated that between 126 thousand and 300 thousand jobs could undergo profound transformations, both in number and in functional content, to respond to the demands for drastic reduction in emissions”.