The Brazilian steel complex at Volta Redonda, in the interior of the state of Rio de Janeiro, has long been seen as a triumph of Brazilian developmentalism. Founded by Getúlio Vargas in 1941, the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (National Steel Company, CSN) was one of the dictator's greatest successes in state planning and economic growth: its steel fed the great construction boom throughout Brazil after the Second World War and the new automobile industry in São Paulo beginning in the late 1950s. Despite its importance to Brazil, Volta Redonda is a little-studied city. Oliver Dinius's thoroughly researched book admirably fills that historiographical void.

Dinius argues that the steelworkers of Volta Redonda were unique in Brazil because they worked in a state enterprise that was also a strategic industry. His thesis is that they were the beneficiaries of Vargas-era trabalhismo and of mid-twentieth-century developmentalism. The steelworkers of Volta Redonda, according to Dinius, used their strategic economic power to outpace all other Brazilian workers in terms of wages in the 1950s. This, it should be noted, is never supported with wage data from specific industries in specific locations, but it is a plausible assertion for the period before the introduction of the multinational automobile industry later in the decade. Dinius further argues that this success eventually hurt the CSN, which ran Volta Redonda, and thus limited the workers' ability to continue to increase their wages.

Dinius is a tireless researcher, and he has done a masterful job of collecting information from a wide variety of CSN and union archives. Indeed, this is the singular strength of Brazil's Steel City. Moreover, Dinius is true to his sources and rarely exaggerates his findings. He does, however, structure his arguments in often contradictory ways. Each chapter lays out an idea from the historiography. Dinius then carefully reconstructs what should have happened, at least according to theory and other histories. But, because he is such a careful researcher, he ends up concluding that things did not transpire as expected. This is clearest in his chapters on the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party, PCB) and on workers' strategic power on the shop floor.

In ‘Beware of the Communists’, Dinius is faithful to the dominant, though highly suspect, thread in the labour historiography that sees the PCB behind many successful labour struggles at this time. Most of the chapter follows government and industry sources on the prevalence of communists in Volta Redonda and their power within the union. Dinius carefully recounts every twist and turn in communist politics and details government paranoia about the PCB. After noting the government's 1947 estimates of at least 2,000 communists working at Volta Redonda, which would have made communism the dominant ideological orientation at the steel complex, Dinius admits, ‘But in truth the number of card-carrying party members was much smaller – at best in the dozens’ (p. 139). Later in the book, he cites a study done after the 1964 coup by the military government itself that found ‘hardly any Communists’ at Volta Redonda in the early 1960s (p. 232).

The chapter entitled ‘Power over Production’ provides a painstakingly constructed analysis of strategic power within the CSN facilities. Dinius looks carefully at work categories, skills and labour markets. He shows that workers in the electricity-generating facilities probably had more strategic power than more highly skilled workers on the shop floor. Thirty pages into this 31-page chapter, Dinius concludes, ‘This chapter has established that the division of labor at the CSN created strategic positions, but it is less clear how this latent technically strategic power translated into the strong bargaining position the union held throughout the 1950s’ (p. 177). Dinius similarly details Vargas' trabalhismo by analysing official statements about the relationship of workers and organised labour to the Ministry of Labour, but then admits that even this state enterprise did not adhere to the labour laws for many years and had a very low union density during the Estado Novo and immediately afterwards; only 10 per cent of the workers paying the mandatory union tax went on to join the union in the mid-1940s (p. 128).

The problem is that Dinius is a terrific researcher and an honest historian, but he does not break away from the constraints of the dominant narratives on Brazilian labour. His own evidence shows that neither trabalhismo nor developmentalism played the central role in workers' organising and protest activities, and both did little to raise their wages. The data he presents demonstrate that the macro-level political and economic contexts are the keys for understanding how Volta Redonda's workers fared from 1941 to 1964. During the Dutra years (1946–51), when labour throughout Brazil suffered, these steelworkers experienced wage compression. When Vargas returned to power as an elected populist (1951–4), the workers of Volta Redonda did well, like industrial workers elsewhere in Brazil. Like workers' unions throughout Brazil, Volta Redonda's steelworkers' union was freest from state tutelage under the elected Vargas. CSN workers' experiences seemed to mirror those of other industrial workers under Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–61) as well. And Volta Redonda's steelworkers flourished under João Goulart (1961–4), but then so did most Brazilian workers.

Dinius is a wonderful researcher and knows Volta Redonda as well as anyone, but his failure to place his analysis into the broader context of Brazilian politics and economics, and to understand the place of other workers throughout the nation, undermines his thesis about the uniqueness of the CSN. Indeed, what is so interesting about Volta Redonda is how closely the experiences of its workers with the Ministry of Labour, the labour courts, foremen, and so on follow those of workers in Brazil's major industrial centres. Despite their employment in a state-owned enterprise, these steelworkers had much in common with industrial labourers in domestic and multinational firms in São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere.

In these ways Brazil's Steel City can be a difficult book to read, but that is because Dinius has done such a superb job of researching his subject. He bases his conclusions, though not his theses, in that outstanding research. Brazil's Steel City, despite its contradictory organisation and style, is unquestionably the single best book on Volta Redonda, and should be read by anyone interested in Latin American labour, economic and political history of the era.