About the establishment of the collective contracting in Europe and Portugal

Abstract

This text is the introduction of a future work, under conclusion, entitled «Typographers and the beginning of collective contracting in Portugal». As a matter of fact, the beginning of collective contracting in Portugal are basically linked with the prolonged, tenacions and conscious action of the organized typographic workers: the first collective contract really deserving such a name in Portugal was the result of workers and bosses of the typographic industry in Lisbon. After that first attempt, dated 1904, others would come, always in the graphic sector, to attain, at last, the first lasting results, even if they were weekly institutionalized, at the end of the First World War, already in the middle of the First Portuguese Republic. The present article intends to establish briefly the origin of the contractual institution in Europe, at the social, economic, doctrinal and juridical level, in order to discuss then the claimed introduction of the collective contract in Portugal by Salazar's corporatist regime. In the next article the author will describe, in detail, the action of Portuguese typographers since the beginning of liberalism up to the fall of the Republican regime and beginning of the dictatorship.