This book begins with a brief description of the legal foundations of the corporative labor relations system in Brazil. It analyzes strike activity in Brazil as it increased in frequency and intensity from 1945 to 1963 while undergoing fundamental changes in composition.

This book begins with a brief description of the legal foundations of the corporative labor relations system in Brazil. It analyzes strike activity in Brazil as it increased in frequency and intensity from 1945 to 1963 while undergoing fundamental changes in composition.

This Oxford Handbook comprehensively examines the field of Latin American history.

This text takes a novel approach to labor. Rather than examine the labor movement, labor unions, and labor organizing, Work, Protest, and Identity in Twentieth-Century Latin America sets work in the context of social history in Latin America. It combines a chronological approach with a topical one to clarify how work is related to other themes in daily Latin American life-themes such as gender, race, family life, ethnicity, immigration, politics, industrial and agricultural growth, and religion. The essays in this collection bring together original studies and published works that illustrate the tensions and conflicts between work, identity, and community that caused protest to take many different forms in Latin American countries. Designed to give students a better appreciation for the complexity of the lives of the wage-working sectors of society and the richness of their contributions to the cultures and nations of the region, Work, Protest, and Identity in Twentieth-Century Latin America is essential for courses on the social history of Latin America, state formation, labor and protest, and surveys of modern Latin America.

This book is the first major study of industrialists and social policy in Latin America. Barbara Weinstein examines the vast array of programs sponsored by a new generation of Brazilian industrialists who sought to impose on the nation their vision of a rational, hierarchical, and efficient society. She explores in detail two national agencies founded in the 1940s (SENAI and SESI) that placed vocational training and social welfare programs directly in the hands of industrialist associations. Assessing the industrialists' motives, Weinstein also discusses how both men and women in Brazil's working class received the agencies' activities. Inspired by the concepts of scientific management, rational organization, and applied psychology, Sao Paulo's industrialists initiated wide-ranging programs to raise the standard of living, increase productivity, and at the same time secure lasting social peace. According to Weinstein, workers initially embraced many of their efforts but were nonetheless suspicious of employers' motives and questioned their commitment to progressivism. By the 1950s, industrial leaders' notion of the working class as morally defective and their insistence on stemming civil unrest at all costs increasingly diverged from populist politics and led to the industrialists' active support of the 1964 military coup.

This book re-examines the relationship between development strategy and political regime in twentieth-century Brazil. The first part of the study examines the beginning in the 1920s and 1930s of the centralized regime and state-centered development model later challenged in the 1980s, taking into account the economic and political role of Sao Paulo relative to the federal government. The analysis provides a distinctive account of the regime ruling Brazil from the 1930s through the 1980s. The second part focuses on the process of economic and political change in the 1980s and 1990s, paying particular attention to the Cardoso administration.

The extraordinary stories of low-income women living in São Paulo, industrial case studies and the details of three squatter settlements, and communities in the periphery researched in Simone Buechler’s book, Labor in a Globalizing City, allow us to better understand the period of economic transformation in São Paulo from 1996 to 2003. Buechler’s in-depth ethnographic research over a period of 17 years include interviews with a variety of social actors ranging from favela inhabitants to Wall Street bankers. Buechler examines the paradox of a globalizing city with highly developed financial, service, and industrial sectors, but at the same time a growing sector of microenterprises, degraded labor, considerable unemployment, unprecedented inequality, and precarious infrastructure in its low-income communities. The author argues that informalization and low-income women’s labor are an integral part of the global economy. Other countries are continuing to use the same kind of neo-liberal economic model even though once again with the latest global financial crisis, it has proven to be detrimental to many workers.