Introduction

In Portugal, the institutionalisation of social work took place in the 1930s under the veil of the Estado Novo (New State), a right-wing conservative dictatorship. In that context, social workers were expected to act within the ideological and political boundaries of the authoritarian regime. Portuguese social workers were, then, instrumental to the dictatorship's authority and, as such, served the regime's moral order while acting as agents of social conformity and control (Martins, 2010). However, from the 1960s onwards, signs of rupture began to be noticed, corresponding to an increasing involvement of social work professionals, students and educators in political movements, often engaging in oppositional, resistance and subversive activities against the regime (Martins, 2017).

The profession, framed in the context of a fascist-prone corporativist state, was deemed to serve its purposes and was collectively represented, from the 1950s, by a single professional trade union. The leadership of the union, as in many other corporativist organisations, was occupied by high-profile senior social workers trusted by the regime (Ferreira et al 1992; Pimentel, 2001). It remained like that until 1970, when younger social workers pulled the union away from the Estado Novo's political power (Martins, 2017; Silva, 2019b; Matos-Silveira et al, 2020).

This chapter revolves around this process of renovation, steered from the inside of the profession in direct connection with the social and political mobilisations against the dictatorship that were happening outside of the ranks of social work. The changes observed in the Portuguese social workers’ trade union at this time show a process of renovation taking place within the profession at a time when collective action and civil liberties were severely limited and violently repressed.

In this chapter, the takeover of the social workers’ union will be recalled and contextualised within the frame of the social, political and ideological transformations occurring in Portugal in the final years of the Estado Novo dictatorship. The processes that underpinned the union's new political engagement, both endogenous and exogenous to the profession, will be examined, focusing, especially, on how this movement of young progressive and politicised social workers turned the only organisation representative of the profession into an instrument of class political action.