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Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2210939

1527-1900

Stephen Bell,

Brazilian History and Foreign Policy

Brazil’s Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) steel plant, located at Volta Redonda in the state of Rio de Janeiro, formed Brazil’s largest industrial enterprise at the middle of the twentieth century. As such, its importance for understanding Brazil’s historical development is, like the physical scale of the mill itself, massive. Many of the structural bars and beams used in numerous aspects of Brazilian development — for example, within the forest of skyscrapers that began to appear in São Paulo and parts of Rio de Janeiro — no longer needed to be imported once Volta Redonda began producing steel in 1946. Numerous authors have paid some attention to the plant’s roles in Brazilian development. However, Oliver Dinius’s study, a revision and extension of his 2004 Harvard thesis, provides a most welcome detailed account. His book gives an in-depth treatment of the building of the plant, along with the development of a labor force increasingly sophisticated in its scale, technical character, and politics. In particular, Dinius shows how major ideological pillars in Brazilian state capitalism, namely desenvolvimentismo and trabalhismo, showed both connections and contradictions through various phases of Brazilian politics, from Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo to the military coup of 1964. A remarkable feature of this book is its extensive analysis supported by sampling the CSN’s personnel files. These detailed records form the backbone of Dinius’s research and provide remarkable substance for his arguments. This is emphatically a welcome archive-based approach to labor history.Much of the 1920s and 1930s saw Brazilian governments in involved negotiations with various international steel companies and concession hunters, drawn to Brazil by the prospect of large-scale iron ore exports. This is a history still worthy of closer attention. But once the idea of building an integrated steel mill in Brazil was decoupled from iron ore exports, progress was rapid under the Estado Novo. All the equipment used to build the mill — this at a time of war — came from the United States. The driving force for construction within Brazil was Edmundo de Macedo Soares e Silva. The book provides excellent background on him, including his extensive education in metallurgy. The building of Volta Redonda was a technical challenge for Brazil, but it was also a human drama involving a pool of some 48,000 migrants, almost all of them from the southeastern region of the country. Dinius includes an excellent series of maps providing data on the origins of the migrants.In Brazil’s Estado Novo, state and society were viewed as an organic whole with a moral purpose. Macedo Soares, in some ways the human colossus of this project, used every opportunity to promote Catholic ideology within his work. There are many telling observations in Dinius’s study related to this point. For example, the bishop of Barra do Piraí spent so much time at Volta Redonda that the Vatican eventually made the city co-seat of the diocese in 1955. In the period of building up the mill to operate at full proportions, there was considerable scope for occupational mobility, a wave that came to an end by 1951. In analysis of labor militancy within the plant, it is striking how much exaggeration of any supposed Communist threat was present. The findings of this book reveal very deep penetration of Communist circles. CSN personnel files were used by police at Rio de Janeiro for the political screening of workers.In analyzing the strategic division of labor and seeking to determine where bargaining power lay at its strongest, this book pays a great deal of careful attention to the production process. This hardly makes for light reading, but it provides a valuable contribution to Brazilian labor history. The book ends with a call for a greater emphasis on the study of labor within strategic industries. It does seem remarkable that, thus far, Petrobras has attracted even less attention than the CSN.Oliver Dinius has given us a carefully documented study on an important topic. Photographs drawn from the CSN archives enhance the text’s material, providing a sense of the scale of the project. The quality of the maps in the study is uneven. Those depicting migration catchment areas are carefully prepared and highly informative. On the other hand, the inset map emphasizing the importance of existing rail infrastructure in the strategic location of Volta Redonda is not helped by the omission of some locations judged of key importance in the discussion. Slips in this book are remarkably few in my estimation. The author made a wide search for material in the preparation of this study, including recourse within the United States to collections in the Baker Library at Harvard. Scholars based in North America wanting to build forward from this study should also be aware of the extensive Donald Rady papers on the Brazilian steel industry and Volta Redonda kept in the Department of Special Collections of the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA.