The article compares two different sets of biographies and socio-occupational trajectories gathered in São Paulo metropolitan region to discuss the possible set of conditions that provide (or withhold) with resources those individuals submitted to high unemployment risk (correlated to processes of intense economic restructuring under fragile protection systems). The first data set encloses socio-occupational trajectories of men and women, in different moments of their lifecycle, who had been occupied as middle-range managers in service sectors, before losing their jobs as a result of firm restructuring processes. The second, taken as a contra-factual, provides socio-occupational trajectories of telemarketing operators, working at call centers; whilst most former middle-managers remained as long-term unemployed, those men and women, achieved to maintain their jobs even under precarious work conditions.
Occupational Trajectories; Unemployment; Gender; Brazil; São Paulo