Portugal - The Brain Drain

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Compounding the problem of massive nationalizations was the heavy drain of managerial and technical expertise away from the public enterprises. The income-leveling measures of the MFA revolutionary regime, together with the "antifascist" purges in factories, offices, and large agricultural estates, inducedÍÍÍÍ an exodus of human capital, mainly to Brazil. This loss of managers, technicians, and business people inspired a popular Lisbon saying, "Portugal used to send its legs to Brazil, but now we are sending our heads."

Notwithstanding the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a small number of family-based financial-industrial groups, Portuguese business culture permitted a surprising upward mobility of educated individuals with middle-class backgrounds into professional management careers. Before the Revolution of 1974, the largest, most technologically advanced (and most recently organized) firms offered the greatest opportunity for management careers based on merit rather than on accident of birth.

A detailed analysis of Portugal's loss of managerial resources is contained in Harry M. Makler's follow-up surveys of 306 enterprises, conducted in July 1976, and again in June 1977. His study makes clear that nationalization was greater in the modern, large, technically advanced industries than in the traditional industries such as textiles, apparel, and construction. In small enterprises (fifty to ninety-nine employees), only 15 percent of the industrialists had quit as compared with 43 percent in the larger. In the giant firms (1,000 or more employees), more than half had quit. Makler's calculations show that the higher the socioeconomic class origin, the greater the likelihood that the industrialist had left the firm. He also notes that "the more upwardly mobile also were more likely to have quit than those who were downwardly socially mobile." Significantly, a much larger percentage of professional managers (52 percent) compared with owners of production (i.e., founders--18 percent, heirs--21 percent, and owner-managers--32 percent) had left their enterprises.

The constitution of 1976 confirmed the large and interventionist role of the state in the economy. Its Marxist character before the 1989 revisions was revealed in a number of its articles, which pointed to a "classless society" and the "socialization of the means of production" and proclaimed all nationalizations made after April 25, 1974 as "irreversible conquests of the working classes." The constitution also defined new power relationships between labor and management, with a strong bias in labor's favor. All regulations with reference to layoffs, including collective redundancy, were circumscribed by Article 53.

Data as of January 1993


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