We are currently living in a scenario in which the increase of unemployment rates, the
worsening of working conditions and setbacks in the scope of social rights have been
amplifying the poverty as well as increasing the number of workers looking for alternative
means to guarantee income and survival. The activities carried out by the poor population are
escalating in Brazilian cities in number and variety and it is intensifying the divisions of labor,
assumed in this research, as a starting point to understand the theory of the circuits of the
urban economy. We intend to analyze the working conditions present in the lower circuit of
Palmas, from two niches of activities: the motorcycle taxi service and the street commerce.
For this study we chose documentary and bibliographic research and, in the field work, we
conducted interviews with 65 workers enrolled in the investigated activities. The results
indicated that the lower circuit in Palmas follows a national trend, that means it is in the midst
of an expansion process, having the current crisis of employment and the expansion of the
entrepreneurship and self-employment discourse as drivers, these factors have been used by
capital and supported by a neoliberal state as strategies to expand the forms of domination of
the working class. On top of that, it also reinforces that unemployment and precariousness are
inherent to the capitalist mode of production. In addition to that, the research indicates the
deterioration of the living conditions most of the workers interviewed suffer, given the
precarious and unprotected ways in which they work. The activities of the lower circuit in the
capital city of Tocantins have become an exile for a contingent of unemployed people, rather
than the solution to the serious problem the productive world is currently experiencing. Thus,
the motorcycle taxi people and street vendors experience the process of precariousness not
only at work, but also of their lives.
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