Analyzing how and why employers use fixed-term contracts or alternative forms of flexible, shortterm labor in five labor-intensive industries in Norway and Sweden, the main research question in this article is how employer hiring of temporary labor is affected by differences in national employment regulations and industries. Regarding employer motives, we find strong and similar inter-industry differences across the two countries, while the share of fixed-term employees is generally higher in Sweden than in Norway where regulations are stricter. Further, employers' hiring of fixed-term labor is contingent on their access to alternative sources of flexible labor when faced with shifting demand, need for substitutes, or complex shift plans. The mix of fixed-term labor, agency workers, and use of extra part-time work also varies across industries, depending on the pattern of production, work organization, and workforce gender profile.

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This paper presents a procedure for risk assessment for hydrological disasters considering the threshold rainfall and environmental and social criteria. A case study was carried out to test its feasibility in the northern region of the State of São Paulo, Brazil. The advantage of this procedure is that it only uses data available on government institutions and websites. For this reason, other regions and countries can easily adapt the procedure to their reality. Initially, the hydrological disasters were obtained including date, type of disaster, geographical coordinates and the number of victims. Next, for each disaster, the daily rains corresponding to the dates of the events were obtained from government websites, to establish the rainfall thresholds. Social criteria weighted the poverty index, population density, and the elderly population. The Environmental criteria weighted hydrology, geomorphology and geology factors. An open-source Geographic Information System (GIS) enabled the spatial distribution of disasters through the characterization of the physical environment in hydrology, geomorphology and geology features. The risk assessment was then obtained by combining the rainfall-triggering event with the environmental Susceptibility with social vulnerability. As a result, 31 of the 138 studied municipalities suffered from hydrological disasters, accounting for 99 occurrences between 2002 and 2017.