“If urgent measures are not taken, the qualified workforce in the construction sector may be reaching the end of the line. At this moment, we no longer need 60,000 or 70,000, but 90,000 qualified workers”, said the union president, Albano Ribeiro, in statements to Lusa.

As an example, the union leader pointed to a construction site he visited last week, “which had 150 workers, of which only 20% were Portuguese. The remainder were foreign workers, 50% to 60% unskilled, who had never worked in the construction sector and many of them don’t even know who they work for,” he said.

Albano Ribeiro says that the aging of the sector is at the basis of this situation, which is unable to attract new workers “because it is not attractive, given the salaries”.

As a result, construction is increasingly dependent on foreign workers, whom the union guarantees “it has nothing against”, but which says they cannot continue to arrive in Portugal completely disintegrated, professionally and socially. “Right now there are dozens of foreign workers that we, the union, have supported with money for transport and food. But we want to put an end to this, it cannot continue”, maintained Albano Ribeiro.

In this sense, the Construction Union intends to organize, on February 1st, a meeting in Porto, to which it will invite the president of the employers' association AICCOPN, the Minister of Labour and the embassies of Brazil, Colombia, Morocco and Peru, which are the countries from which he says the most workers arrive for the sector.

Regarding fatal accidents in the construction sector, the Construction Union highlighted the 51% reduction in the number of deaths between 2022 and 2023, from 54 to 27, pointing out as an objective for this year a new year-on-year decrease, in the order of 70%.