The pandemic exposed and accelerated this process of flexibilisation, informalisation, precariousness, and vulnerability of the labour market that platformisation has been implementing in societies in general. In fact, during the first lockdown of the pandemic, class inequality became even more pronounced with a segmentation of the labour market and invisibilisation of workers (Bourdieu, 1998). There was a division between non-essential and essential frontline workers, demarcating those who risk their lives on a daily basis, dealing face to face with the health crisis, subjecting themselves to the virus. According to Antunes (2022), these are situations of pandemic capitalism in which life is disregarded for the sake of profit.
Having not fully recovered from the Great Recession, which resulted in a restructuring of work and global economy, the working-class has been facing a Covid-19 pandemic, a scenario of environmental crisis, a continuous war between Ukraine and Russia and the eminence of a nuclear war in the middle east. This context has been leading to massive dismissals, inflation crises, wages and housing costs that have diverged so dramatically that the dream of a middle-class life has become impossible to achieve. Millions of people around the world are becoming itinerant and migrant workers, due to the lack of permanent and location-based jobs and the high cost of housing and living. This phenomenon is occurring not only in the United States, but especially in Europe, experiencing significant immigration from African, Asian and South American countries, as people search for better life and working conditions. Between the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, Portugal went from being traditionally known as a country of emigration, to being also recognised as a country ofimmigration. Several migratory flows have been observed since then in the country, obeying concrete economic-political circumstances, with migratory flows from PALOP (Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe), Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and Asia. These people form the extensive and long-lasting reserve army of labour that is always available to perform temporary, informal, and precarious work.
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