At issue are, for example, workers related to sales, waiters and waitresses and machine operators for the manufacture of textiles, identifies a new study by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, which calls for the training of workers.

Based on the Personnel Framework figures, and at a time when digitalisation is already transforming the job market, the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation decided to analyse which jobs are most exposed to the effects (positive and negative) of technology, recognizing that, with this knowledge, it will be possible to “design concrete strategies to take advantage of the benefits and reduce the negative impacts of technological change.”

As for the destructive effects, researchers consider the replacement of tasks previously performed by humans by technological tools.

Transformative effects are understood as AI applications that “complement, augment and transform human work, making it more productive”.

Based on these definitions, the new study then divides total employment registered in Portugal into four main areas: professions on the rise (high exposure to transformative effects and low to destructive effects), professions in decline (low exposure to transformative effects and high to destructive effects), the area of ​​humans (low exposure to both) and the area of ​​machines (high exposure to both).

Now, in these professions in collapse — which “are at serious risk of extinction, given their vulnerability to technological disruption”, warns the FFMS — there are 28.8% of employees in Portugal.

Worse still, one of the professions that fall into this category — and is therefore seriously threatened — is one of the most common in Portugal: workers involved in sales (corresponding to 5.3% of employment in the country). “This highlights the scale of the problem,” the study authors emphasize.

Furthermore, of the ten professions with the most employees in Portugal, three are “in collapse” (in addition to the one already mentioned, the “other elementary professions” stand out, which cover 3.5% of jobs, and waiters and bar staff, which cover 2.5% of jobs).

In addition to these, operators of machines for the manufacture of textile, fur and leather products, sheet metal workers, skilled food processing workers, cooks, and cashiers and ticket sales operators are also “in collapse” (although they have less weight in the job market).

The FFMS study warns that workers in the professions that are collapsing receive, on average, lower incomes than other employees and, as a general rule, have few qualifications (only 5.4% have completed higher education). “They are therefore in a more vulnerable position in the event of unemployment or precarious employment,” the authors point out.

And they recommend that policymakers already take into account a scenario of additional pressure on the Social Security system, as well as consider the implementation of active policies, “with objectives such as the retraining of workers and the unemployed” and the reinsertion of unemployed people into the labour market.

The less bad news is that the efforts to reskill these workers “may not be especially demanding,” since the skills required by the collapsing professions are close to those required in some jobs that are in the human domain (low exposure to the disruptive and transformative effects of technology), which “could facilitate the transition of workers.”