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Portugal The Brain Drain
Compounding the problem of massive nationalizations was
the
heavy drain of managerial and technical expertise away
from the
public enterprises. The income-leveling measures of the
MFA
revolutionary regime, together with the "antifascist"
purges in
factories, offices, and large agricultural estates,
induced an
exodus of human capital, mainly to Brazil. This loss of
managers,
technicians, and business people inspired a popular Lisbon
saying, "Portugal used to send its legs to Brazil, but now
we are
sending our heads."
Notwithstanding the concentration of the means of
production
in the hands of a small number of family-based
financial-industrial groups, Portuguese business culture
permitted a surprising upward mobility of educated
individuals
with middle-class backgrounds into professional management
careers. Before the Revolution of 1974, the largest, most
technologically advanced (and most recently organized)
firms
offered the greatest opportunity for management careers
based on
merit rather than on accident of birth.
A detailed analysis of Portugal's loss of managerial
resources is contained in Harry M. Makler's follow-up
surveys of
306 enterprises, conducted in July 1976, and again in June
1977.
His study makes clear that nationalization was greater in
the
modern, large, technically advanced industries than in the
traditional industries such as textiles, apparel, and
construction. In small enterprises (fifty to ninety-nine
employees), only 15 percent of the industrialists had quit
as
compared with 43 percent in the larger. In the giant firms
(1,000
or more employees), more than half had quit. Makler's
calculations show that the higher the socioeconomic class
origin,
the greater the likelihood that the industrialist had left
the
firm. He also notes that "the more upwardly mobile also
were more
likely to have quit than those who were downwardly
socially
mobile." Significantly, a much larger percentage of
professional
managers (52 percent) compared with owners of production
(i.e.,
founders--18 percent, heirs--21 percent, and
owner-managers--32
percent) had left their enterprises.
The constitution of 1976 confirmed the large and
interventionist role of the state in the economy. Its
Marxist
character before the 1989 revisions was revealed in a
number of
its articles, which pointed to a "classless society" and
the
"socialization of the means of production" and proclaimed
all
nationalizations made after April 25, 1974 as
"irreversible
conquests of the working classes." The constitution also
defined
new power relationships between labor and management, with
a
strong bias in labor's favor. All regulations with
reference to
layoffs, including collective redundancy, were
circumscribed by
Article 53.
Data as of January 1993
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