Starting with an ethnography conducted with informal garbage collectors in Comodoro Rivadavia's dump in Argentina, the objective of the paper is to analyse the concept of alienation. It examines the strengths and limits of the concept of alienation in the analysis of job insecurity affecting these people. Their labor biographies involve alternating periods of insertion in the labor market, periods of unemployment, and periods of subsisting in the informal economy. Thus, the article pretends to answer the following questions: how does the notion of alienation work in each of these stages? Having been defined in terms of labor exploitation, how do we understand the processes of alienation when faced with unemployment?, and how do we understand the processes of alienation in relation to a subsistence that revolves around informal economy?
alienation; informal economy; unemployment; work