The paper proposes the concept of ‘marginal pole’ of the economy to characterise a new level of Latin American economic activity, which has a precarious relationship with the basic means of production controlled by the dominant levels of the economy as a whole. The ‘marginalised labour force’ employed here is a distinct new sector within the working population. It is argued that the concept of ‘marginalised labour force’ is more appropriate in this case than that of ‘industrial reserve army’ and enables certain consequences of marginalisation to be analysed.