RESUMO

The State is crucial to the intensification of precarious work in the contemporary scene. The main objective of this article is to analyze evidence on the intensification of job insecurity in Brazilian university hospitals after the transfer of their management to Empresa Brasileira de Serviços Hospitalares, specifically at Hospital Universitário Onofre Lopes, linked to Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, locus of our research. We are guided by the method of interpreting critical dialectical reality, because we understand that events in the world of men must be explained through history and because we understand that social reality is dynamic, contradictory, and impermanent. This research is bibliographic and empirical, since we refer to bibliographic studies by authors who discuss the central categories of our analyses: State, capitalism, and precarious work. We also conducted in-person qualitative interviews with 12 workers at Hospital Universitário Onofre Lopes and with a public servant who works at the university campus of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, totaling 13 interviews, analyzed using the content analysis technique. The interpretation of our research data revealed the tendency of the State to break the stability of civil servants through public service outsourcing as a way to intensify job insecurity and to make the targeting of public budget towards financial capital more flexible, to the detriment of investments in social policy, such as health policy.