Oliver Dinius
Oliver Dinius is the Executive Director of the Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi and an Associate Professor of History. His research focuses on contemporary Latin America. A native of Germany, he received the equivalent of a B. A. from the Ruprecht-Karls Universitaet Heidelberg before moving to the United States to pursue doctoral work in Latin American history. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004 and joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi the same year. Dr. Dinius's research focuses on the history of social and economic development, above all in 20th- and 21st-century Brazil. His first book, Brazil's Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964 (Stanford UP, 2011), is a history of the country's foremost state-owned enterprise, the Companhia Siderurgica Nacional. He is also the co-editor of Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities (University of Georgia Press, 2011), a book that has been cited in many languages and all continents except Antarctica.
Currently, Dinius is working on two projects under the umbrella theme of development and inequality in postwar Brazil: a monograph on the history of development initiatives for the Amazon region. The overarching goal is to understand how regional and class inequalities shaped (and often undermined) the state's ambitious social and economic development policies.
For the Croft Institute, Dinius regularly teaches the Introduction to International Studies (Inst 101), the core course on Latin America (Inst 207), and upper-division courses on "The War on Drugs in Latin America," "The Problem of Inequality in Latin America," and "Soccer Madness: From Brazil to the World." He advises Croft senior theses on a wide range of Latin American topics. Dinius also offers lecture classes, upper-division seminars, and graduate courses on Brazil and modern Latin America through the history department.
Supervisors: 1) PhD Advisor: Emeritus Prof. Dr. John Womack, Jr. (Harvard U.), 2) PhD Second Reader: Emeritus Prof. Dr. Michael M. Hall (UNICAMP), and 3) PhD Third Reader: Emeritus Prof. Dr. John H. Coatsworth (Columbia U.)
Phone: +1-662-915-1500
Address: Croft Institute for International Studies
University of Mississippi
Lyceum Circle
University, MS 38677
Currently, Dinius is working on two projects under the umbrella theme of development and inequality in postwar Brazil: a monograph on the history of development initiatives for the Amazon region. The overarching goal is to understand how regional and class inequalities shaped (and often undermined) the state's ambitious social and economic development policies.
For the Croft Institute, Dinius regularly teaches the Introduction to International Studies (Inst 101), the core course on Latin America (Inst 207), and upper-division courses on "The War on Drugs in Latin America," "The Problem of Inequality in Latin America," and "Soccer Madness: From Brazil to the World." He advises Croft senior theses on a wide range of Latin American topics. Dinius also offers lecture classes, upper-division seminars, and graduate courses on Brazil and modern Latin America through the history department.
Supervisors: 1) PhD Advisor: Emeritus Prof. Dr. John Womack, Jr. (Harvard U.), 2) PhD Second Reader: Emeritus Prof. Dr. Michael M. Hall (UNICAMP), and 3) PhD Third Reader: Emeritus Prof. Dr. John H. Coatsworth (Columbia U.)
Phone: +1-662-915-1500
Address: Croft Institute for International Studies
University of Mississippi
Lyceum Circle
University, MS 38677
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Books by Oliver Dinius
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.
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.
Papers by Oliver Dinius
This article analyzes the construction of the steel town of Volta Redonda, Brazil, as a state paternalist project. The steel mill and its company town, built in the early 1940s during the Estado Novo government of President Getúlio Vargas, were intended to set a new standard for the country's economic and social development. Empirically, the article tries to explain the logic of the company town as a paternalist project from the perspective of the state and the company, which thought of social assistance programs and mechanisms of social control as two sides of the same coin. Within that perspective, the article analyzes how the company translated paternalist ideology into concrete measures, but it also takes account of the shortcomings. The discussion highlights the importance of Christian social doctrine for the underlying ideology of welfare paternalism and demonstrates how its doctrinal principles permeated the urban design and the company's social assistance programs. I...
1) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
2) Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL)
3) Contreras Sepulveda, Manuel
4) Export-Import Bank (EXIM)
5) Khrushchev, Nikita
6) Operation Condor
7) Soviet Union, Latin American Policy
company, has symbolized the power of industrial capitalism to exploit natural
resources and transform society both in its vast ambition and its remarkable
futility. It has represented the ambitions of industrialists and social reformers
to transform working-class culture and impose work habits that could increase labor productivity and diminish social conflict. It has embodied the vision of architects and urban planners for new spaces of human habitation that promised — but not necessarily accomplished — improvements in living conditions for working families in material, social, and spiritual terms. Company towns have symbolized the controlling presence of industrial companies, but they have also been the site of working people’s struggles to improve the conditions of work and build communities on their own terms. The essays in this volume examine the economic, political, social, and cultural history of company towns in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and the United States to illustrate the impact — often uneven and contradictory — of processes of industrial modernization on working people throughout the Americas.
Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities, ed. by Oliver Dinius & Angela Vergara (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
Database by Oliver Dinius
A base de dados Dissídios: Trabalhadores e Justiça do Trabalho disponibiliza processos trabalhistas de natureza coletiva e informações destinadas a pesquisas qualitativas e quantitativas a partir da investigação de milhares de autos do Tribunal Regional do Trabalho da 2ª. Região, com sede em São Paulo, entre 1946 e 1979.
Este instrumento de pesquisa é dotado de ferramentas de busca que permitem cruzar informações por meio de índices cronológico, temático, onomástico, geográfico e institucional, além de tipos de reivindicações, resultado das decisões judiciais, entre vários outros aspectos.
(Presentation:
The database "Dissídios: Trabalhadores e Justiça do Trabalho" makes available collective labor court cases to facilitate qualitative and quantitative research in thousands of court records from the Regional Labor Court in Sao Paulo (2nd Region within Brazil) between 1946 and 1979.
This research tool has functions that allow for searches by timeline, topic, name, location, and institution, as well as by type of claim and the case outcome, among others.)
International Grants, Awards, and Scholarships by Oliver Dinius
Co-hosted by Dr. Armin Mathis, Nucleo de Altos Estudos Amazonicos (NAEA) at Universidade Federal do Para (UFPA), and by Dr. Alfredo Homma, EMBRAPA Oriental.
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.
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.
This article analyzes the construction of the steel town of Volta Redonda, Brazil, as a state paternalist project. The steel mill and its company town, built in the early 1940s during the Estado Novo government of President Getúlio Vargas, were intended to set a new standard for the country's economic and social development. Empirically, the article tries to explain the logic of the company town as a paternalist project from the perspective of the state and the company, which thought of social assistance programs and mechanisms of social control as two sides of the same coin. Within that perspective, the article analyzes how the company translated paternalist ideology into concrete measures, but it also takes account of the shortcomings. The discussion highlights the importance of Christian social doctrine for the underlying ideology of welfare paternalism and demonstrates how its doctrinal principles permeated the urban design and the company's social assistance programs. I...
1) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
2) Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL)
3) Contreras Sepulveda, Manuel
4) Export-Import Bank (EXIM)
5) Khrushchev, Nikita
6) Operation Condor
7) Soviet Union, Latin American Policy
company, has symbolized the power of industrial capitalism to exploit natural
resources and transform society both in its vast ambition and its remarkable
futility. It has represented the ambitions of industrialists and social reformers
to transform working-class culture and impose work habits that could increase labor productivity and diminish social conflict. It has embodied the vision of architects and urban planners for new spaces of human habitation that promised — but not necessarily accomplished — improvements in living conditions for working families in material, social, and spiritual terms. Company towns have symbolized the controlling presence of industrial companies, but they have also been the site of working people’s struggles to improve the conditions of work and build communities on their own terms. The essays in this volume examine the economic, political, social, and cultural history of company towns in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and the United States to illustrate the impact — often uneven and contradictory — of processes of industrial modernization on working people throughout the Americas.
Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities, ed. by Oliver Dinius & Angela Vergara (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
A base de dados Dissídios: Trabalhadores e Justiça do Trabalho disponibiliza processos trabalhistas de natureza coletiva e informações destinadas a pesquisas qualitativas e quantitativas a partir da investigação de milhares de autos do Tribunal Regional do Trabalho da 2ª. Região, com sede em São Paulo, entre 1946 e 1979.
Este instrumento de pesquisa é dotado de ferramentas de busca que permitem cruzar informações por meio de índices cronológico, temático, onomástico, geográfico e institucional, além de tipos de reivindicações, resultado das decisões judiciais, entre vários outros aspectos.
(Presentation:
The database "Dissídios: Trabalhadores e Justiça do Trabalho" makes available collective labor court cases to facilitate qualitative and quantitative research in thousands of court records from the Regional Labor Court in Sao Paulo (2nd Region within Brazil) between 1946 and 1979.
This research tool has functions that allow for searches by timeline, topic, name, location, and institution, as well as by type of claim and the case outcome, among others.)
Co-hosted by Dr. Armin Mathis, Nucleo de Altos Estudos Amazonicos (NAEA) at Universidade Federal do Para (UFPA), and by Dr. Alfredo Homma, EMBRAPA Oriental.
[...]
Thus, the developmental state in mid-20th century Brazil assumed a broad range of tasks. First and foremost, it focused on strengthening the country’s industrial development in the southeastern core: it facilitated access to credit, strengthened infrastructure (road and railroad transportation, electrical power, ports), and invested in basic industries at the heart of a modern economy (mining, steel, chemicals, petroleum). The state did not merely regulate the capitalist economy; it intervened directly and participated. This was industrial state capitalism. For the rest of the country, economically the periphery, the developmental state played a much more modest role.
[...]
[...]
This essay focuses on the transnational dimension of Brazil’s effort to make headway in the social and economic development of the Amazon. In 1951, the Brazilian government of Getúlio Vargas – who had been returned to the presidency by popular vote in 1950 -- requested technical assistance from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The initial request aimed primarily at assistance with conducting a survey of the feasibility of developing a forestry industry in the Amazon, but it opened the door for other areas of technical assistance as well. Over the course of the next decade, the FAO would send several missions to the Amazon to assist the Brazilian government in its efforts to develop the country’s vast northern region. Once SPVEA came into existence, the scale and scope of the FAO Mission to the Amazon Valley expanded to include programs on fisheries, geology, animal production and health, pastures, agricultural economics, pedology (i.e., soil science), and agronomy, in addition to a scaled-up forestry program.
[...]
"The key to solving our economic problems and even to defining our political destiny lies in the establishment of a national steel industry."
—Elysio de Carvalho, 1919, "Brasil, potência mundial" (opening sentence)
By 1940, the state of Brazil’s economy still posed major obstacles to fulfilling Elysio de Carvalho’s dream of a national steel industry. The economy was industrializing, not yet industrial. The use of mechanized power had begun in the mid-nineteenth century, spread more widely in the 1890s, and reached most Brazilian states after World War I. Still, by the 1930s, only the country’s southeast had a developed industrial economy, and even there the extensive use of industrial power remained limited to urban centers and the railroad corridors. The forces of mechanization had yet to transform the mode of production in the vast interior. Advocates of an industrialization policy, often military officers, became more vocal after World War I, which had taught them that the ability to fight a modern war depended on industrial development. They hoped that a modern steel industry would jump-start an industrial revolution in Brazil and ultimately help develop an industrial sector that could produce modern armaments. The advocates of a national steel industry found a champion of their cause in President Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945), who promise to provide the political, institutional, and financial support needed to set Brazil on a course of rapid and extensive industrial development.
"Brazil is tuned in on Volta Redonda. This is one of its great wartime industrial achievements. It would be a good-sized steel mill in the United States but for Brazil it is an undertaking of great proportions and the largest plant in all Latin America."
José Silvado Bueno
(Foreign Trade Adviser, Pan American Union, 1946)
The Estado Novo’s propaganda machine portrayed the construction of a national steel mill as a transformative event that would place the nation’s industrial economy on a new footing. For the people of Volta Redonda, unaware of the years of political wrangling, skillful diplomacy, and technical preparation, the arrival of the CSN meant sudden and dramatic change. The village of Santo Antônio de Volta Redonda was a sleepy place in the heart of the southeastern coastal range, the Serra do Mar, at an elevation of 1,280 feet. It was in the heart of the “Sul Fluminense,” a region on the western tip of the state of Rio de Janeiro, bordering Minas Gerais to the north and São Paulo to the west (Map 2.1). Administratively, the village belonged to the municipality of Barra Mansa, which had a population of 26,346 of whom 8,800 lived in the head town. According to the 1940 census, less than 5 percent of the municipality’s inhabitants had graduated from primary school and only 36 percent were literate. The municipal district of Volta Redonda had 2,782 inhabitants, the village about 1,000. It owed its name to the course of the Paraíba River, which made a 'volta redonda' (full turn). The river split the village into two parts connected only by a wooden toll bridge and a ferry. The Paraíba also posed a health risk during heavy summer rains, when it flooded the village and caused outbreaks of malaria and typhoid.
"Once it had been decided to locate the steel mill in Volta Redonda, the work began to integrate man into the collective, to discipline the masses for a great industrial task,
the greatest ever realized in the country. It was necessary to regiment the men—in their majority rural laborers . . . —to imbue them with a new mentality, capable of becoming useful pieces in the industrial complex that was being built . . ."
Paulo Monteiro Mendes
(Diretor Secretário of the CSN, January 27, 1959)
As in the Soviet Union, Brazil’s state-led expansion of heavy industry went hand in hand with a government effort to engineer a new type of worker adapted to twentieth-century industrial society. President Getúlio Vargas conceived of Volta Redonda as the cornerstone of the country’s industrial modernity, in not only economic but also social and cultural terms. The steel town was to be the realization of his project to usher Brazil into an industrial revolution without violent class conflict. He provided the CSN with the political mandate, the financial resources, and the institutional power to engineer workers who combined technical skill, work discipline, and a commitment to social peace. The task for the CSN was to acculturate men of rural origins to work in a large industrial facility and to forge a community of working-class families. The social engineering began with the physical construction of the town and would continue long after the mill had been inaugurated.
"Title I: Organization
Art. 2: The president exercises the supreme administration of personnel at the National Steel Company . . .
Title XIV: Duties of the Employee
Art. 63: Beyond the duties inherent to his position . . . , the employee must:
a) comply promptly with work orders received from superiors;
b) perform the work that has been assigned with quickness and care; . . .
d) treat everyone with civility; . . .
f) maintain a spirit of camaraderie and the best possible cooperation with colleagues;
g) avoid wasting work time with conversations . . ."
—CSN Personnel Regulation, 1946
The CSN began as a construction company and became a steel producer only in 1946. The transition required complex managerial decisions because of the fundamental differences in the profile of the workforce and the organization of work. Technical director Edmundo de Macedo Soares e Silva had prepared the transition all the while he oversaw the construction. One reason that he took up residence in Volta Redonda during the
construction years was to have the opportunity to observe the men at work and recruit the most capable as the core of the mill’s future operational workforce. He instructed the engineers in charge of construction units to keep their eyes open for men who had the requisite skills and good work habits. In 1944, more than a year before the mill’s anticipated inauguration date, the company began training heavy-equipment operators and maintenance specialists. Despite all that careful planning, the transition remained a difficult task with many uncertainties caused by the ongoing world war and the poor state of the infrastructure, which made it difficult to anticipate the exact timing of the startup of production. More uncertain, still, was how quickly the company would be able to elevate its steel output to the projected capacity with a labor force that had no experience working in a modern steel mill. The engineers anticipated that the first years of production would be a period of trial and error.
"It is obvious that we waged our most important struggle against Communism. We were always in the offensive, with determination, but without boasting, confronting the opponents’ ploys and the incomprehension of the pseudo-democrats."
— Major Adauto Esmeraldo
(Director of the Federal Political Police, 1947)
The concentration of industrial workers made Volta Redonda a potential hotbed for militancy. The Brazilian Communist Party (Partido Comunista do Brasil; PCB) saw the city as a target of opportunity in its effort to rebuild a working-class base when the grip of the Estado Novo began to loosen in 1943. The administration of the National Steel Company (CSN) feared radical labor organization and took preemptive measures from day one of the construction of the mill. Heavy-handed labor control came naturally to the company directors. Steeped in a military tradition, they saw repression of radical elements as a necessary complement to social assistance programs designed to foster social peace. To their mind, progress required order. The company’s security forces cooperated closely with the newly created political police at both the state and federal level to prevent the emergence of a militant labor movement. The 1943 labor law, which guaranteed the right to unionize, appeared to place limits on the police’s preemptive measures against militants, but the law also enhanced the role of law enforcement. The Labor Ministry used the political police to screen union officials’ political pasts and launched investigations into Communist influence on unions based on reports of its field officers. The political police became an integral part of the bureaucratic politics of labor control.
"In case of a lack of electricity from LIGHT:
a) Manually disconnect . . . the two switches (6,600V) for the entry of power from LIGHT;
b) Verify the tension (6,600V) at the entry point for power from LIGHT and notify the thermoelectric plant that the reduction switches can be connected;
c) Reconnect the entire system of the principal substation with the panel switches (32 switches) and monitor the relays that had been activated . . ."
— Occupational Description, Operator, Principal Substation, CSN
This chapter analyzes the technical division of labor at the CSN’s integrated steel mill to help explain why the steelworkers unions enjoyed such a strong bargaining position in the 1950s. The underlying questions are whether the steelworkers of Volta Redonda occupied a technically strategic position in Brazil’s economy and, if yes, which workers held technically strategic positions within the mill. The industrial relations scholar John Dunlop distinguished two types of strategic positions: the position of the firm in the industrial economy at large and the positions of the workers in the mill’s internal division of labor. By 1950, the CSN had become one of Brazil’s most strategic industries. It accounted for more than 50 percent of domestic steel supply and was the country’s primary producer of rails, structural steel, and columns and beams for new industrial
buildings and major bridges. It held a domestic monopoly for cold-rolled sheet, galvanized sheet, and tin plate. In the early 1950s, the company already underwent its second expansion to meet the growing demand by industrial consumers of steel. Developmentalist governments planned for the CSN to feed the growth of the nascent capital goods sector. To avoid stoppages or strikes in this strategic industry was both an economic and a political imperative. The workers of such a strategic industry held strategic power if they could credibly threaten to shut down production.
"The CSN, pride and example of Brazil’s industrial organization, must maintain—as the leading company of national industry—dignifying standards in the application of the
letter and the spirit of our country’s labor law. Thereby, she will retain the special place that her peers assign to her and contribute, with her worthy conduct, to the realization of
legitimate victories of social and labor legislation that forms part of our Constitution."
— Letter from the Metalworkers Union to the CSN Directorate, August 1955
The presidential elections in October 1950 fundamentally changed the political conditions for labor mobilization in Volta Redonda. President Eurico Dutra (1946–1951), albeit originally elected by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (Partido Social Democrático; PSD) and the Brazilian Labor Party (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro; PTB), had governed with the support of conservative forces on an antilabor platform. He had pursued much more economically liberal policies than Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo government and had placed less emphasis on the strengthening of domestic industry. Driven by Cold War logic, the Dutra government had engineered an anti-Communist crackdown on unions that rolled back the modest gains organized labor had made since the promulgation of the federal labor law in 1943. Dutra’s disregard for labor rights, which had been guaranteed by the 1946 constitution, and the blanket intervention in industrial unions had labor leaders across the political spectrum calling for change. The 1950 presidential race was a referendum on both Dutra’s presidency and on the legacy of the Estado Novo.
"In this instant . . . the Radio Siderúrgica Nacional . . . goes on the air to call on Volta Redonda, to send a warning to Volta Redonda, to tell Volta Redonda—represented by all
the social classes, starting with the most humble workers— that this is a decisive moment . . . Volta Redonda, as part of our economic emancipation, cannot fail to participate in this instant when Brazil will choose its course, either the course of liberation or the course of enslavement."
— Othon Reis Fernandes
Leader of the Metalworkers Union
April 1, 1964
The events of 1955 had strengthened the bargaining position of the metalworkers union. José Claudio Alves’s victory in the union’s presidential elections, finally confirmed in October after months of uncertainty, ensured that the union remained the workers’ legitimate representative for contract negotiations. Alves vowed to push for wage concessions and improved working conditions much more aggressively than his immediate predecessor, Walter Millen da Silva, who had lost all credibility by supporting the intervention in the union. Alves tried to rally the membership and generate momentum for a contract with gains comparable to those made in 1952 and 1953. He saw the CSN in a weak bargaining position because it had supported the intervention and been defeated. Nominally, the company had maintained neutrality in the conflict, but President Macedo Soares’s conduct during the standoff betrayed his sympathies. The union leaders expected the new federal government under President Juscelino Kubitschek and Vice-President João Goulart, scheduled to take office in early 1956, to support the workers’ cause. Most important, they expected Kubitschek to appoint a new company president from the PSD-PTB camp to replace Macedo Soares, who sympathized with the conservative National Democratic Union (União Democrática Nacional; UDN).