João Quesado Delgado

Precarity is often interpreted as a neoliberal management strategy to maximize profits in private companies through the endorsement of insecure jobs, inadequate wages, and limited rights for workers. This interpretation, however, is unsuitable to analyse situations where the State endorses precarity in non-profit public organizations, for example, State-sponsored universities. We hypothesize that in these situations, the ‘precarity paradox’ is particularly prone to manifest. Such a paradox can be defined as the endorsement of precarity to induce organizational productivity and flexibility that, instead, leads to overwhelming inefficiencies and productivity losses. To test this hypothesis, we conducted empirical research at the faculty of engineering of a Portuguese public university where precarious contracts are dominant among researchers. Based on the analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data collected, it is concluded that productivity- and flexibility-oriented precarities reduce the productivity of researchers while jeopardizing the capacity of the faculty to rationally employ its human resources.

The environmental problems caused by sewage sludge generated by the growth of the global population and urbanization are drawing the attention of the scientific community worldwide to the need of developing sustainable solutions to use that material. This work investigated the possibilities of using sewage sludge, generated in wastewater treatment plants, as a strategy to improve and stabilize collapsible soils. Different soil–sludge mixtures, with 5%, 10%, and 15% of sludge, were analyzed. For the characterization and analysis of the soil–sludge interaction, physical, chemical, and edometric experiments were performed. The results showed that the addition of sludge to the soil causes a void index reduction, improves particle packaging, and reduces soil collapsibility to the same specific dry apparent weights, i.e., showed to be a promising method for the improvement of collapsible soils.