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Hispanic American Historical Review 80.1 (2000) 191-192



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Book Review

Workers' Control in Latin America, 1930-1979

National Period

Workers' Control in Latin America, 1930-1979. Edited by Jonathan C. Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Photographs. Illustration. Maps. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 328 pp. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $19.95.

This exceptionally cohesive set of essays uses a revamped version of the workers' control paradigm to explore Latin American labor struggles in the years after 1930. The authors focus on foreign-controlled industries, many of which eventually underwent nationalization: sugar in Cuba, oil in Mexico, railroads in Mexico, Guatemala, and Argentina; mining in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. (Exceptions include Michael Snodgrass's synthetic study of Peronism and Joel Wolfe's article on the textile industry.) Despite this focus, the authors do not test Charles Bergquist's influential thesis regarding foreign ownership and worker militancy. Instead, they attempt a bottom-up approach focused on workers' attempts to exert control over their surroundings. In the introductory and concluding chapters, Jonathan Brown defines and discusses this revised theory of workers' control. As defined by Brown and other contributors, "workers' control" includes laborers' attempts to regulate not only the production process but also their own lives. Such efforts, according to the authors, may lead laborers to participate in national politics.

The use of the term workers' control to describe this approach does not fully capture the contribution of these essays or the complexity of the issues at hand. As developed by David Montgomery and others, the concept of workers' control was originally meant to shift scholarly attention to the shop floor, thus transforming a labor historiography narrowly focused on labor institutions and labor-state relations. Several authors in this volume show their debt to this original notion of workers' control by examining workers' responses, at the shop floor level, to rationalization. In an essay on U.S. Railway Mission to Mexico, Andrea Spears details rail workers' resistance to mission reforms that eroded worker autonomy. Examining the Argentine railroads, MarĂ­a Celina Tuozzo describes the importance to wage earners of work rules that limited companies' ability to control supervision and promotion. Joel Wolfe gives us firsthand accounts of how workers experienced mechanization as a deterioration of the work process. But in general, contributors to this volume extend the original concept of workers' control in several ways. Most important, they examine shop floor struggles alongside workers' [End Page 191] attempts to develop effective organizations and sway national leaders. Here, the biases of the original workers' control concept, which privileged workers' more immediate demands over their politics, stunt the authors' ability to effectively combine analysis of the grassroots with a more political, state-centered narrative. It blinds them, for instance, to the ways in which national politics could not only hinder or help workers but also shape their demands. Anti-imperialism was, as Joanna Swanger suggests, important to Chilean copper miners because it articulated their desire to control their workplace and living conditions. But worker nationalism and worker participation in national politics more generally were not always secondary or instrumental, as Swanger and others at times imply.

Despite these blind spots, the essays in this volume give us engaging analyses of the sometimes tense, sometimes friendly relations between laborers, union leaders, and populist leaders. Brown discusses how Mexican oil workers intent on improving work conditions persuaded union leaders not to give in to the oil companies, thereby contributing to the nationalization of the industry. Wolfe demonstrates how autonomous factory commissions made up largely of women bypassed the co-opted pelego union leadership to force concessions from GetĂșlio Vargas during his second presidency. Andrew Boeger explores how miners in Chojlla, Bolivia, furthered their goals in the years following the 1952 revolution by allying with other miners, the labor movement, and reformist national leaders. And Josh DeWind examines the distance between urban leftist leaders looking for proletarian followers and workers of the Peruvian Cerro de Pasco Corporation, who maintained strong ties to agrarian communities.

The ability of the authors to convey...

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