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

Brazil's Steel City presents a social history of the National Steel Company (CSN), Brazil's foremost state-owned company and largest industrial enterprise in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the role the steelworkers played in Brazil's social and economic development under the country's import substitution policies from the early 1940s to the 1964 military coup. Counter to prevalent interpretations of industrial labor in Latin America, where workers figure above all as victims of capitalist exploitation, Dinius shows that CSN workers held strategic power and used it to reshape the company's labor regime, extracting impressive wage gains and benefits. Dinius argues that these workers, and their peers in similarly strategic industries, had the power to undermine the state capitalist development model prevalent in the large economies of postwar Latin America. Inducing an industrial revolution : the creation of the national steel company Industry comes to a village, villagers come to an industry State paternalism in the making of a company town From construction to production : labor management in transition Beware of the communists : political policing and labor control Power over production : the technical division of labor and workers' strategic positions in steel Strategic power, labor politics, and the rise of the metalworkers union The crisis of developmentalism : from union hegemony to the military coup. This text presents a social history of the National Steel Company (CSN), Brazil's foremost state-owned company and largest industrial enterprise in the mid-20th century