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Over the last five years the policy focus has been on job creation in Mozambique, but much less attention has been paid to the interrelations of wage labour and social reproduction in the context of low-wage casualised employment, high turn-over of the labour force and poor public provisioning. Important questions emerge as to whether job creation entails the destruction of livelihoods. This IDeIAS bulletin brings a complementary dimension to the IDeIAS nº 117 on work in the Mozambican agroindustry by taking a social reproduction perspective to understand the organisation of wage labour, its tensions and linkages besides the workplace, and how it is embedded in workers’ lives. The dynamics of social reproduction in rural southern Africa are fundamental but remain overlooked (Cousins et al., 2018). The analysis draws upon data from interviews with cashew processing and forest plantations workers and households in Gaza (2018-2019) and Niassa (2014-2016). We argue that wellbeing is not limited to having a job and receiving a wage, in fact livelihoods and well-being may be endangered by having a low-paid job and having to work multiple precarious jobs. In the current narrow pattern of growth in Mozambique, a diverse range of work enables the reproduction of human life, labour power and capital. Unless the coconstitutive interrelations between production and reproduction are understood and addressed, the fragmentation of livelihoods will lead to a crisis of social reproduction and of the accumulation system.