Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities

CHAPTER 6 "Glory Days No More: Catholic Paternalism and Labor Relations in Brazil's Steel City"

134 chapter six Glory Days No More Catholic Paternalism and Labor Relations in Brazil’s Steel City oliver j. dinius Volta Redonda should be known in the world. The work that is done here is above all educational because it is a true example that our society moves towards the exercise of the common good, something very precious to our church. Therefore, we also feel responsible for this work. —Letter from Dom Agnelo Rossi, bishop of Barra do Piraí (1956–62), to Edmundo de Macedo Soares e Silva, president of the csn (1954–59) Dom Agnelo’s letter refers to the “work” of constructing a steel mill and a company town in Volta Redonda in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state. The Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (csn; National Steel Company), a stateadministered enterprise created by Getulio Vargas’s Estado Novo government in 1941, chose the site for the country’s first integrated mill and thus transformed it into a center of the postwar industrialization drive. But Volta Redonda was to be more than the engine of the nation’s industrial economy. The government wanted the city to serve as an example for the industrial modernity and social progress that it envisioned for the Brazil of the future. The csn designed a company town that offered its inhabitants far better accommodations, urban services, and leisure options than industrial workers enjoyed elsewhere in Brazil—or anywhere else in Latin America for that matter. Already during construction, the company commissioned films and cinematic newsreels to document the work and project an image of Volta Redonda as a site of national destiny. Glory Days No More • 135 The construction of the company town progressed more slowly than anticipated and never quite matched the ambition of the original plan, but Volta Redonda nevertheless set a new standard. Rather than residing in overcrowded and unsanitary tenement housing so common in large cities, workers lived in single-family units whose size and level of comfort depended on the employee’s rank in the company’s occupational hierarchy. The houses all had running water , sewage, and electricity. Front lawns and cobble-stoned streets gave the residential neighborhoods a suburban quality reminiscent of the garden city design common in Anglo-American company towns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to a hospital and schools for all ages, the original urban design included parks, athletic facilities, cinemas, and a commercial center to meet the population’s basic shopping needs.1 In the first decade of its existence, the csn sponsored the creation of social clubs for the employees, the construction of professional sports facilities, and the founding of numerous cultural and religious associations. The infrastructure enabled the city to host national sports events and large congresses. Many older residents still remember the day in the mid-1950s when the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters came to town.2 At the same time, the csn exercised far-reaching control over the lives of all company town inhabitants. It took the monthly rent, debts owed to the figure 6.1 Volta Redonda’s main workers’ neighborhood, the Vila Santa Cecília. Note the grid pattern of the roads and the prominent place of Santa Cecília Church and the technical school (far left) in the town layout. Late 1940s. csn Photographic Archive. 136 • oliver j. dinius company store, repayments of advances, and charges for water, sewage, and electricity directly out of the paycheck, which on occasion reduced employees’ take-home pay so much that they had difficulty meeting other expenses. The csn also restricted the inhabitants’ freedoms on company lands. Anybody who wanted to form an association, hold a meeting, or stage a rally had to receive written permission from the company. The csn forbade any political demonstrations on company grounds and used its police force to disperse protestors in collaboration with state law enforcement. The company exercised tight control over the movement of people in the company town by imposing a nightly curfew for most of the 1940s and setting up road blocks to control the entry and exit of vehicles. Most invasive was the close cooperation with the federal political police against organizations that might challenge the csn’s control, such as the incipient metalworkers union.3 The company town thus stood for both rapid social progress and rigid social order. The ideological fabric that united those seemingly contradictory objectives was a paternalism that...