The study seeks to interpret the relationship between the Roma population and social status using concepts commonly employed in social sciences. Going beyond the state level, these concepts contextualize the development of local ethnic and class relations within broader political and economic processes. The two concepts in question are the reserve army of labour/surplus population and the precariat. The authors demonstrate that class has always played a prominent role in Hungarian sociohistorical and sociological research, but class and ethnicity often remain mutually exclusive in these discussions. The chosen concepts, however, shed light on the fact that their interplay creates peculiar conditions in the rural spaces examined here. Although they originate from different sociological traditions, these two concepts both have advantages for analysis, which are the subject of the present paper. Firstly, they allow the interpretation of local phenomena by placing them in the context of global economic and political processes. Secondly, both concepts bring together ethnicity and class relations within the same frame. Thirdly, both the concept of reserve army of labour/ surplus population and that of the precariat highlight that in these rural spaces, ethnic and class relations – and the concomitant ethnicised class conflicts – are organized by the access to the benefits of formal, permanent wage labour.