What is proposed in this work is to analyze the situation of the automotive industrial chain since the explosion of the world economic crisis (in 2008, in the United States) to the present day and to identify the reflection of the crisis in the jobs of that productive matrix. The economic crisis at the end of the first decade of the 21st century is compounded by the political crisis that deepened after the 2014 elections in the country. To this end, the adapted model, used elsewhere, is replicated, mapping the automotive production chain (Torres & Cário, 2012; Dulci, 2015, 2018) from Brazilian clusters. The objective here is to identify which workers were laid off by the automakers, which were kept and which economic activities were most affected. The hypothesis is that workers directly linked to production, with less demand for qualification, are the first to be laid off. Therefore, the formulation of Adalberto Cardoso (1998) is simplified here, in a work that analyzes the systemic restructuring and the experience accumulated in the face of the skills acquired in formal qualification, in order to test it again in a critical context, in which the crisis is external to the productive configuration per se, but at the same time it affects and is affected by the possibilities of productive reconfiguration. Therefore, we chose to illustrate the Brazilian situation the comparative strategy, with two “new” automotive territories (the south of the state of Rio de Janeiro and the industrial hub of Camaçari, in Bahia), against the “traditional” territory of the Greater ABC Paulista. , in order to investigate whether there are differences in corporate behavior in plants that underwent restructuring processes in relation to those already installed in the most modern ways. The data used comprise the years 2007 to 2017 (the year immediately prior to the international crisis and the most recent year with available information, respectively).