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Based on a study which began in the summer of 2018 in a section of the Secours populaire français (SPF) in a municipality of about 470,000 inhabitants, the article shows how lockdown, by disrupting the rules for allocating food parcels –in particular by preventing the application of the resource criterion– revealed that assistance to precarious fractions of the working classes depended on power relations between volunteers. Faced with a significant increase in attendance, the association’s employees and volunteers had to adapt methods of distributing food parcels. This crisis setting generated by the lockdown temporarily served as a motivation for the implementation of an unconditional reception, around which actors inside the association developed different “principles of local justice” that are linked to the positions they occupy at the SPF. However, the unconditional reception was an exceptional period, in the middle of the confinement. Both at the beginning and at the end of the confinement, conditionality played a role in who received support leading to the invention of new “rules of prioritization”. In order to respect these rules, the association’s employees and volunteers developed practices of suspicion.