[No Title Available]

Abstract

The third issue of the magazine Work, Education and Health deals with five subject areas: precariousness and suffering in the world of labour; the concept of (work) activity; the funding of secondary teaching and of professional education; professional training in health; and public policies (on health).Precariousness and suffering are issues of interest for the fields of training and work in the area of health, not only because they are closely related to the research on the workers' health in the context of the (new) capitalism, but also due to their significance for the reflection on the organization of contemporary labour, in which both "health workers" and "work in the area of health" are inserted. The subject is discussed in two articles: Márcia Leite, using approaches that come originally from the sociology of work, deals with work precariousness in the context of the restructuring of production. She demonstrates how contracting-out processes affect, in a different manner, the different levels of the production chain and the various social groups. Acacia Kuenzer, taking as reference the contradictory and practical character of work, explores the real situation faced by health and educational workers, a situation marked, on the one hand, by a higher level of suffering at work and, on the other, by the possibilities of developing strategies to confront social inequalities.The notion of activity, second theme in this issue, is dealt with in two papers. In the essay, Beth Brait, using the Bakhtinian dialogical approach, analyses the constitution of both subject and identity as a discursive activity in the context of contemporary capitalism. Yves Schwartz's article discusses Marx's concept of labour and the correlate notion of activity with the help of issues raised by the service sector. When these two papers explore the crossing between discourse, subject and human activity -all related, in the last instance, to the very fabric of history -they are clearly contributing to a renewal of the concept of work and to the studies on "work in the area of health".The section entitled Debate deals with the third theme -funding of professional education and secondary teaching -in three different texts. José Marcelino Pinto, having as a starting point the presentation of the official figures on the pupil/year costs, discusses the financial resources necessary to guarantee an improvement in the quality of teaching offered today. Nicholas Davies draws a panorama of some structural and contingent challenges for the funding of state education, in particular secondary teaching, proving that past governments' expenditure per pupil have tended to decrease, a trend that is being repeated in the present federal administration. Jailson dos Santos shows how, besides the adoption of macroeconomic adjustments, the transfer of resources to implement a policy of universalization of basic education has also seriously affected the budgets of