Concerts of Employers: An History of Portuguese Business Associations
We present an historical account of 45 years of Portuguese democracy (1974-2019), through a characterisation of such organisations on the basis of who do they represent, with what resources, applied into what outputs, while trying to understand the internal and external relations in which they are embedded.
Such analysis allows for a discussion on the way in which the States and markets – and within the latter, large business groups – interact with associations that institutionalise power relations between employers.
The organisational features of employer associations, the political exchange they enter into with public authorities and the degree to which they represent (and/or contribute to) the dominance of main market players are three dimensions which we attempt to interconnect.
To that purpose, we mobilise empirical evidence based on over forty-five years of legal documents from the Portuguese Ministry of Labour, two-thousand news articles, hundreds of official magazines of business associations and around two-dozen interviews with people active within these organisations.
From a universe of over 600 employer associations, we zoom in on the main national organisations that formally represent business interests in Portugal, taking into account the historical contexts in which their development unfolds, the relationships they establish between with each other and vis-à-vis public authorities, while considering the role played by seven of the main national business groups.