This article is the product of a study about the "world of labor" and its transformations at the global level in the past 30 years, with an emphasis on the significant changes underway in Uruguay. The study was conducted in 2003 & 2004, as a final project in the school of Social Service at the University of the Republic, Uruguay. The purpose was to understand, through a bibliographic and theoretical perspective, the situation of employment in Uruguay and the maintenance of precarious conditions as a form of sustaining the rate of profit of capital. The methodology used was basically that of theoretical analysis. The author worked for three years as a social assistant in a settlement, which allowed her to gain a more realistic understanding of the situation that is described in a theoretical manner. As a preliminary conclusion, it can be said that structural unemployment, the key cause of current poverty - strongly symbolized by the "cardboard pickers" - has characteristics that let it serve to reduce production costs, thus completing a circuit in which capital makes labor relations precarious and maintains them at a level that allows sustaining and increasing the rate of profit.
labor; employment; social question; recycling