This book portrays the labor movement in the Brazilian port city of Santos in the period between the two World Wars. Author Fernando Teixeira da Silva reconstructs a period of rapid urbanization, economic instability, and worker ferment in a city known for the combative nature of organized labor. The author focuses on the two types of work that predominated in interwar Santos: civil construction and, above all, dock work. Through his finely grained local history approach, Silva describes both the clashes of interests between labor and management and the reformulation of each class from within.

The first part of this book examines the cultural and social ecology of labor in interwar Santos, and the second reconstructs the trajectory of the workers movement. The connections that Silva establishes between Santos's particular working-class culture and the city's labor movement form the crux of his analytical project.

The first two chapters focus on civil construction workers and the gradual erosion of their power vis-à-vis management after the end of the First World War. Construction workers played an especially important part in the labor movement in Santos in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Considered “craftsmen” (“artistas”) and reputed as exceptionally dignified among workers, civil construction workers' high level of skill lent them considerable collective power. A new militancy arose in response to the diminished standard of living during the First World War. Silva reveals the minute steps in the escalation of the conflict between labor and management, as civil construction labor leaders gained a reputation as exceptionally combative and were targeted by their employers, with the complicity of the state (121). Once a privileged faction among workers, laborers in civil construction came to play a “central role within the working class” as both construction and technology advanced at an accelerating pace during the First World War. Yet the overall story he recounts is one of deskilling and loss of bargaining power. In the poignant example Silva provides, they went from proudly wearing closed shoes and a tie and exhibiting particular pride in both their work and their relative strength vis-à-vis management, to, in 1935, having the highest rate of illiteracy among all workers in Santos (122).

Chapters Three and Four concentrate on workers at the Santos docks and their largely successful fight for control of the labor force in the interwar period, resulting in the enduring achievement of the closed shop. Because of dockworkers' presumed isolation from the rest of society and their supposed lack of hierarchy, many have concluded that their work environment is inherently conducive to labor militancy. Silva uses archival evidence from Santos and a broad, comparative survey of secondary literature to call into question stereotypical explanations of dockworkers' political behavior. He takes issue with the idea that work at the docks took place within a closed community that predetermined workers' ideological and cultural predilections. On the contrary, dockworkers were an integral part of the cultural and social fabric of the city, he argues. He uses a variety of sources such as criminal records to reconstruct the culture of “bravery” (valentia) “and the pride of being “workers without bosses'” (from which he derives the title of this monograph), which according to Silva comprise a set of values shared among dockworkers (149). Having already conquered the closed shop in the 1920s, in the following decade the dockworkers' union in Santos achieved something extraordinary: the right to contract labor directly. They thereby gained control of the labor market, thus effectively approximating their dream of working “without bosses.”

Part Two discusses the rise and decline of “direct action syndicalism,” from which Santos earned the nickname “Brazilian Barcelona.” In chapters Five and Six, Silva examines the surge of strike activity in 1919–1920 and the rivalries between different ideological factions within the labor movement. Among the strategic and ideological positions were supporters of reformist syndicalism, who defended the use of worker agitation within the limits of the law. The series of strikes on the docks immediately following the First World War brought to the surface divergences in strategy and approach within labor; some opted for direct action and others for the “necessity for intermediaries in the conflict” (259). Through a detailed reconstruction of events, the author questions the conventional wisdom about the decline of anarchism, direct-action syndicalism, and other shifts in the interwar labor movement.

Chapters Seven and Eight examine the effects of repression and show the law as a battlefield on which labor, management, and the state fought about the meaning of the social question. This aggregate of issues concerning social inequality and justice—and public order—rose to the surface of public discourse in early-twentieth-century Brazil. Silva describes the judicial expulsion of foreigners, xenophobia, and extralegal police violence, which he then applies to understanding the brutal repression during the strike wave in Santos in 1919–1920. The author directly confronts the deeply problematic nature of the police documents and trial records he uses here, while squeezing valuable information out of these cases.

Chapters Nine and Ten investigate the familiar theme of the incorporation of labor into the corporatist state, primarily under President Getúlio Vargas. Communists consistently opposed the co-optation of the workers' movement by the corporatist state. By the Second World War, “the communists had established their uncontested leadership among the workers of Santos, giving rise to the city's characterization as the “Brazilian Moscow” or “red city” (394). Silva reconstructs the history of communism in the 1920s and 30s in order to counter the commonly held misconception that communists “flattened the terrain” of working-class organizing in the late 1920s, paving the way for the state co-optation project that would come with Vargas (39).

Silva's goals in writing this book are, in part, empirical; he seeks knowledge of the little-studied union movement in interwar Santos. Hidden beneath this gap-filling mission is an approach to labor history that constitutes a subtle refashioning of the way we understand the Brazilian worker experience. This book transects the traditional chronological divide of 1930 at the end of the First Republic (1889–1930), a decision that allows Silva to study pre-1930 union organizing and culture in order to understand the corporatist state under President Getúlio Vargas and the Liberal Alliance. The author thus distinguishes his work from the normative tradition in labor history scholarship that differentiates starkly between autonomy (pre-1930) and dependency (post-1930), with the implicit value judgments that distinction implies (40).

Among the other unique contributions of this book is his treatment of workers together with management. The author gives the reader an unusual opportunity to observe industrialist Roberto Simonsen's thought put into action, as Silva examines not only the writings but also the personal business interests of this scientific management theorist. The author describes the urban politics of concession contracts, favors, and patronage in the context of the construction boom of the period before and during the First World War. To his credit, Silva sees Simonsen as more than simply a Brazilian incarnation of U.S. engineer Frederick Taylor. In the early 1920s, Simonsen reorganized labor in his civil construction firm according to a scientific model, which bore the influence of Taylorism. Yet Simonsen also was deeply affected by local class politics, the emerging social question in Brazil, and his own interests (notably, in his concession to construct working class housing). Silva's combination of labor history from below with the history of management demonstrates that “scientific management” only functioned thanks to the local knowledge of the companies, for example in establishing a registry for employees, with the assistance of the city's police chief, who was also the company's lawyer (95).

The author's selection of Santos as a case study makes sense on several different levels. In terms of its growth and population density in the early twentieth century, Santos was comparable with larger cities, even Rio de Janeiro. Yet it was also extraordinary in many ways, especially in its renown as a militant city. The author does not overturn this image of Santos as a bastion of radical labor activity as much as he seeks to understand its historical complexity. Santos's famous radical spirit is more interesting to the author as a question of group identity to be explained historically, rather than an historical explanation for the class conflicts that arose in the city in the period he studies.

The author seeks to develop both the book's specificity and its general applicability though an explicitly cultural argument. He emphasizes that dockworkers did not inhabit a closed community but one intricately connected to the city, and influenced by ideas flowing in from the outside. Yet his already expansive view of working-class experience could have been further enlarged to understand culture as formed not only on the work site but also at home, in the street, as consumers of public goods (such as housing), and in moments of leisure. An examination of working-class culture more broadly defined would have strengthened the author's claim that the Santos labor movement's struggle for control signified something broader than the right to make key decisions about and oversee the organization and execution of work; these workers sought control over their own lives and livelihoods (30). His incredibly detailed reconstruction of the trajectory of the labor movement might have left little space for this broadened cultural discussion; it does leave the field wide open for future research that accounts for these workers' lives outside of work, and the lives of those in the working classes who remained outside the aegis of the union movement. Silva's methodological and empirical contributions will certainly facilitate such future studies.

While the struggle for control provided a constant source of pride and solidarity, having achieved the status of workers without bosses did not necessarily signify liberation from oppression for Santos's organized labor. What did change was the new authority that some workers gained to command others. Silva makes this transformation clear in his reconstruction of the final events in the life of former foreman Antoninho Navalhada, introduced earlier in the book. Navalhada's “sad end” comprises the denouement of the author's narrative. Having fallen to the status of a simple worker, he was murdered in 1959 at the hands of a fellow longshoreman, whom he had tried to kill due to a dispute over who had the right to order whom to work. This episode took place in the context of a new work regime, which the dockworkers' union had implemented in order to curtail favoritism. Navalhada's unfortunate destiny makes manifest two of this book's central points: the importance of control as a value for which workers were willing to fight; and the historical process through which we can observe the changes in the conditions under which workers tried to negotiate this control.

The concept of workers without bosses bore different meanings for different actors. For employers, it signaled a world turned upside down and a worst-case scenario. For many workers, it represented a dream of autonomy and liberation from tyranny. Dockworkers managed to diminish the control bosses exerted over their everyday lives but could not completely escape the tyranny of quotidian violence that often rose to the surface as part of the social conflict born out of decades of extreme repression.