I am the grandfather of eight grandchildren from Generations Z and Alpha. I look at them and see intelligence, curiosity, preparation, and an astonishing ability to move through a changing world with ease and instinct. What unsettles me—what quietly angers me—is the thought that the country I am leaving them still treats its young people as disposable labor, offering them a future that falls painfully short of who they are and what they deserve.

The labor reform now under debate begins from a diagnosis that no one acting in good faith can deny. Portugal has lost hundreds of thousands of young people, pays low wages, offers fragile employment ties, and has transformed emigration into a forced career path for far too many of its best and brightest. Even so, the Government insists on calling modernization what, in many cases, is little more than a more polished way of prolonging precarity.

I recognize that there are useful measures within this proposal. The expansion of tax relief for younger workers and support for buying a first home ease some of the suffocation that now shadows those beginning adult life. The investment in continuing education also makes sense, because a country without qualification is not competitive—it is simply more unjust. And I even understand the argument of small businesses, many of which survive pressed against instability and a lack of scale, trying simply to endure another season.

But understanding is not the same as accepting everything. And it is precisely here that this reform fails. Extending temporary contracts from two years to three, and in some cases to five, is not an innocent technical adjustment; it is a political choice with deeply human consequences. It means telling an entire generation that it can wait. Wait for stability. Wait to leave their parents’ home. Wait to start a family. Wait to truly begin living. And a country that tells its young people to wait is, in truth, quietly pushing them toward departure.

The contradiction is glaring, almost insulting. The State tells young people to stay, promises them help to buy a home, yet simultaneously accepts that many will remain without the stable contract that banks demand, landlords demand, and adult life itself demands. This is not coherence. It is institutional cynicism. It is asking people to put down roots while forcing them to live with their bags half packed.

If the additional time genuinely served to train, integrate, and retain talent, the discussion could at least be had—always with caution. But Portugal has already seen too many times how these solutions end: with all the risk placed on the worker and all the convenience left to the employer. To call that balance is an abuse of language. To call it reform is, in many cases, a carefully constructed illusion.

I refuse to accept that my grandchildren should inherit a country where everything is provisional: employment, wages, independence, hope itself. A country like that is not preparing the future; it is mortgaging it.

I do not want to leave my grandchildren a country where everything is temporary. I want to leave them a country where living and working are truly worth it.

Jorge Bettencourt is a retired officer from the Portuguese Navy.