Brazil's Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964 (review)

This work of Dinius joins pioneering Brazilian studies that have used company and personnel records to understand the business end of an enterprise and its management of employees. The book's most original contribution lies in its combination of business history, knowledge of the production process, and quantification to explore the industrial and labor relations of the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN). Inaugurated after World War II, this famous firm looms large in Brazil: economically as its first steel producer, politically as a symbol of Varguismo, and symbolically as a landmark in the country's industrialization.

Unlike the descriptive business and community history of Donald Rady (Volta Redonda, 1973), two-thirds of this work focuses on the years before 1950. It begins with the founding of the CSN and then moves on to the challenges and migratory flows occasioned by its construction in Volta Redonda, an isolated village of 2,712 in the interior of the state of Rio de Janeiro. As the author explains, the CSN began as a construction company that employed 15,000 at its height, and "became a steel producer only in 1946" (p. 99). Chapter 4 covers the subsequent workforce reduction to 8,000, with the gradual shift to steel production. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 include the book's five maps, half its figures and photographs, and three-quarters of its tables, whose data are drawn from an analysis of the personnel records of 94,000 ex-employees (using a sample size of 2,048). Dinius provides rich empirical data on migratory flows, hirings, dismissals and their listed causes, skill profiles across time, work accidents, and suspensions before 1952. The early turnover, extraordinarily high, suggests the difficulties of proletarianizing a labor force of rural origin. Yet this is not fully pursued because of the author's disinterest in the questions of "class formation, political culture, and community" (p. 10) that he believes have monopolized Brazilian labor historiography. Instead, his central concern is with the social engineering of modern capitalist production, including the challenge of acculturating rural migrants to work in a large industrial facility while improving their "work habits in a cultural sense" (pp. 70, 120).

I would have loved to see Dinius do more with this internal company material. Unlike his related 2004 dissertation, the book does not provide the results of the coding of photographs for skin color undertaken by his "research assistant (who categorized herself as negra)" (p. 239). The blast furnace workers in the photo on page 113 are all visibly African-descended, but all we learn, in passing, is that "blacks and pardos constituted a majority of the migrants," largely mineiros who locals disdainfully dubbed baianos (residents of the more African-descended state of Bahia). His observation about the CSN's meticulousness in "fixing proper names" (p. 94) is also fascinating, since even the police were frustrated by "the widespread use of saint names and a legacy of slavery [that] made for many duplicate names" (p. 126). Finally, more sustained analysis of the "disciplinary regime" (pp. 115-120) would also have been useful, even if only as a basis for comparison with other Brazilian and Latin American cases.

On the whole, the author is not very interested in what the new "country bumpkins" brought with them. Yet such information might have helped flesh out what Dinius means by the firm's "paternalism" or even "state paternalism" (pp. 72-77). The CSN, he suggests, "tried to shape workers' culture by marrying the material benefits of industrial modernity . . . with the spiritual certainty of neo-Thomist social doctrine." In building the CSN company town, the Catholic Church was accorded a "strong institutional presence" in the context of what is characterized as Volta Redonda's "staunchly Catholic" hinterland (pp. 70, 95, 81). Although he notes that most workers had "likely never [before] lived...