The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the consequences of the flexibilization of labor relations which had been growing mainly since the 2008 financial crisis, highlighting that precariousness affected the world of work and other dimensions of life, such as family, housing, support networks, health, and well-being. Several authors, such as Anthony Giddens, Margaret Archer, and Bernard Lahire, have analyzed the way in which individuals reflect on themselves with reference to the contexts in which they are inserted. According to this approach, self-reflexivity is activated to deal with contingencies that affect the routinize nature of everyday life, threatening their established ontological security. Therefore, how do precarious workers, behave in the face of high levels of permanent instability and insecurity in the labor market? How do they perceive precariousness? The objective of this paper is to present the results of an analysis focused on the individual agency of 53 workers from different sectors of activity, interviewed between 2019 and 2020 in Portugal. The analysis addresses the ways in which these individuals activate reflexive skills to manage themselves in the face of alife condition characterized by a state of “ontological insecurity”. This presentation will discuss how vulnerable workers reflect on themselves and attribute meaning to their lives with reference to the level of precarious working conditions and the persistence of insecurity and uncertainty. The results led to the development of a three-level typology of self-reflexivity among precarious workers: reflexivity dominated by precariousness, reflexivity rooted in precariousness, and reflexivity uprooted from precariousness.

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Precariousness,Reflexivity,Ontological Insecurity,Precarious Workers,Qualitative Analysis