This article explores the themes of precarity and precarization by looking at specific historical conjunctures in the recent history of Portuguese capitalist development, relevant because of their enduring influence in shaping the mutual constitution of state-led projects of accumulation and development, dominant waged regimes and emergent normative livelihood models and projects. The broader aim is to locate and understand precarization as an ongoing process limiting the options and conditions of ‘wage earning’, and the kin-based, classed and generational structures of feeling through which ordinary people imagine and aspire to be ‘livelihood earners’. It is argued that addressing the dialectic between being a wage earner and a livelihood earner is absolutely central to a deeper understanding of precarization and its multiple manifestations.