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.
In the early 1950s, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) organized a mission to the Brazilian Amazon Valley to assess development needs and help implement a development plan. The Brazilian ...government saw this as part of an initiative to integrate a sparsely populated and 'backward' region more firmly into the nation. The FAO's local partner was the Superintendancy for the Plan of Economic Valorization of the Amazon (SPVEA), a regional development agency created in 1953. This article analyzes the operation of the Mission, specifically its fishery and forestry sections, to understand the dynamics of transnational development cooperation. The mission eventually failed because the Brazilian state never offered sufficient support on FAO terms; SPVEA never acquired the necessary financial resources, administrative capacity and technical expertise. The FAO experts recognized the problems, but had no means to enhance the resources or change the approach of the local partner. The government's decision, in the late 1950s, to prioritize the building of a major road from Brasília to Belém, aggravated the lack of resources for the Mission's work. Importantly, the failure was not a question of ideological resistance to foreign meddling or a fundamental opposition to the FAO development strategy.
Company Towns in the Americas Andrew Herod, Melissa Wright, Nik Heynen / Oliver Dinius, Angela Vergara
01/2011, Letnik:
4
eBook
Company towns were the spatial manifestation of a social ideology and an economic rationale. The contributors to this volume show how national politics, social protest, and local culture transformed ...those founding ideologies by examining the histories of company towns in six countries: Argentina (Firmat), Brazil (Volta Redonda, Santos, Fordlândia), Canada (Sudbury), Chile (El Salvador), Mexico (Santa Rosa, Río Blanco), and the United States (Anaconda, Kellogg, and Sunflower City).
Company towns across the Americas played similar economic and social roles. They advanced the frontiers of industrial capitalism and became powerful symbols of modernity. They expanded national economies by supporting extractive industries on thinly settled frontiers and, as a result, brought more land, natural resources, and people under the control of corporations. U.S. multinational companies exported ideas about work discipline, race, and gender to Latin America as they established company towns there to extend their economic reach. Employers indeed shaped social relations in these company towns through education, welfare, and leisure programs, but these essays also show how working-class communities reshaped these programs to serve their needs.
The editors' introduction and a theoretical essay by labor geographer Andrew Herod provide the context for the case studies and illuminate how the company town serves as a window into both the comparative and transnational histories of labor under industrial capitalism.
PDF
