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  • Brazil's Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964
  • Joseph L. Love
Oliver J. Dinius . Brazil's Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. xxiv + 325 pp. ISBN-10: 0-8047-7168-5, $65.00 (cloth).

This book, based on extensive research in company and government archives, may challenge the reader with its technical detail, but the reward merits the effort. Oliver Dinius offers a history of a firm, its plant, and the larger part of an industry in order to address his principal subject, labor relations in that firm, the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN). The CSN did not have "a single strike in the postwar Republic," yet it offered its workers what were arguably the best wages and working conditions in the country. The secret of the union's success was simple: its workers, or more precisely, those with "strategic power" (a concept Dinius borrows from labor economist John Dunlop), could disrupt the operations of the whole firm. In doing so, they could also disrupt those of many other firms downstream that depended on the CSN's high-quality and often indispensable products.

Yet workers contended with many obstacles on their route from tutelary labor relations to autonomy and material well-being: their trade union was "intervened" from time to time at the request of CSN management, and their elections were sometimes voided in a government-monopoly operation entailing company housing and a company store. The CSN, guided by an ethic of Catholic paternalism, even discouraged workers from using Brazilian dictator Getulio Vargas's new labor arbitration courts.

The CSN was created by Vargas in May 1940, with 20 million dollars supplied by the United States to tie Brazil to an anti-Axis foreign policy. Brazilian capital was obtained from government pension funds, the Brazilian treasury, and private investors. In Volta Redonda, Rio de Janeiro, where the CSN was located, everything was built from scratch, and forty-eight thousand migrants came to the new town, many of them just to construct the plant and worker housing. Latin America's largest steel mill opened in 1946, but it only began [End Page 427] operating at full capacity in 1949. Workers were trained on site: many unskilled workers acquired skills, while others passed from one set of skills to a more demanding set, indicating significant social mobility. As the CSN matured, there was a rising conflict among company managers whether to reward workers for productivity increases—the new emphasis—or reward them for seniority, obedience, and loyalty, the original criteria.

For its part in disciplining workers, the national government switched from "crowd control" to "preemptive policing" in 1933, to identify and root out subversives, namely, Communists. The CSN at the time required an atestado ideológico—showing that the worker in question had a "clean" record. Meanwhile, in 1943, workers formed a union—the unpronounceable STIMMMEBM (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores nas Indústrias Metalúrgicas, Mecánicas, e de Material Elétrico de Barra Mansa [the município where the CSN was located before Volta Redonda split away]). Brazil's first postwar president, General Eurico Dutra, outlawed strikes at the CSN, despite the fact that the 1946 constitution permitted them. Workers could exercise their power by shutting down operations, an option distributed very unevenly among them. This "strategic power" rested most obviously in workers that controlled the electric power grid, on which all production depended. Other strategic sectors were transport and maintenance.

When Vargas returned to office as an elected president in 1951, there was a huge rise in union membership, and he ended the use of the atestado. The first collective bargaining contract went into effect in 1952, and the 1950s were a decade of conquests for labor, despite occasional setbacks. Now workers won one paid day of rest per week, overtime pay for working night shifts, and the cancellation of any record of wartime indiscipline. Inflation-adjusted wages rose by 93 percent between 1951 and 1957, and, although real wages stagnated thereafter, a cost-of-living index was introduced to control inflation.

Union power depended in considerable measure on...

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