The trends identified above result from data on the “officially unemployed”. However,
we should bear in mind that statistics’ are the result of a political and social construction.
Considering the influential work of Phineas Baxandall (2001; 2004), our point
is that the meaning and political salience of unemployment changes over time, depending
on the prevailing model of employment and on the strategies designated to
preserve it. In Portugal, as in other capitalist countries, there is a high number of “employable
individuals” which are under-represented in the official statistics of unemployment
(e.g. persons on training and education, emigrants, workers in the informal
economy, housewives, even if they are interested in working, people that are not
inscribed in the public employment services agencies, either because they do not fulfil
the requirements necessary to have access to the unemployment benefit or because
they were eradicated from the official files and/or because they no longer fulfil the requirements).