Latin American labour scholars have become increasingly interested in the history of leisure time and working-class culture. New studies about neighbourhoods, sports, popular culture and social, family and everyday life have shown that spaces outside work and the hours beyond work strongly influenced working-class identities. For example, in the case of Montevideo, historian Rodolfo Porrini has demonstrated the existence of a vibrant working-class culture that maintained ties to radical political parties. Similarly, Brazilian historian Paulo Fontes has studied how migrant workers built a community in the industrial neighbourhoods of São Paulo. Juan Carlos Yáñez Andrade contributes to these debates by looking at the case of Chile during the first half of the twentieth century. Yáñez Andrade is a prolific labour historian. He has published extensively about the origins and enforcement of Chile's first labour laws and institutions, anarchist movements and the influence of the International Labour Organization in Latin America. More recently, he has explored new topics such as tourism, food consumption and nutrition. In his latest book, El tiempo domesticado, he examines how workers adapted to modern notions of time and rest and how state and employers’ paternalism shaped recreational activities.
Yáñez Andrade's main contribution is bringing together the time ‘inside and outside the factory’ (p. 23). He argues that we must look carefully into working hours and the workplace to understand how employees spend their free time. That is why the book starts with the rationalisation and standardisation of work introduced by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, whose studies and programmes inspired a generation of factory owners and state reformers around the world. By the 1920s, Yáñez Andrade explains, global debates about working hours influenced local legislations, and most countries, including Chile, adopted the eight-hour day. But how workers understood and spent their free time, Yáñez Andrade argues, was also shaped by employers’ paternalist policies, welfare agencies’ programmes, labour unions and political parties, and the rise of mass consumption. By looking at this wide range of activities and actors, the author invites readers to rethink labour history and overcome traditional approaches that have limited workers’ experiences to production and union struggles.
The book contains an introduction and six chapters. The introduction places the topic into a larger historiographical discussion about work and leisure, offering a complete summary of the main debates and contributions in this area of study. It then moves into the first state's efforts to regulate the workday and the workplace in the early twentieth century. One of employers’ and authorities’ main concerns was workers’ absenteeism and high turnover rates. The standard and extended practice of skipping work on Mondays, popularly known as ‘San Lunes’, not only disrupted production but threatened social stability. For many social reformers, absenteeism was a consequence of other problems, including alcoholism, prostitution and social unrest. To modernise and discipline Chilean peons, authorities and employers had to control workers’ time, both their working and free hours. In many ways, Yáñez Andrade argues, labour laws, such as the Sunday rest and the eight-hour day, became tools for disciplining the workforce. The debate about the working week continued in the years following the enactment of the Labour Code (1931). New reforms in the 1940s drew attention to some gaps in the legislation, such as whether meal breaks were or not part of the workday.
The most exciting section of the book is the analysis of the efforts of the state and employers to regulate workers’ free time. In Chapter 4, the author looks at state paternalism. As part of the foundation and expansion of welfare institutions, public authorities and social reformers became concerned about offering working families access to ‘healthy and affordable’ spaces for recreation. In his previous work, Yáñez Andrade researched the state's food-distribution programmes and showed that the state created public cafeterias (comedores) to transform people's diets and promote a healthy life. In this book, he expands on this to analyse other institutions created by the state to provide recreational, cultural and educational activities. If these initiatives came from the top, they were also appropriated by working people and used to reinforce their identity. Although not addressed in detail in this book, it is worth mentioning that ideas of gender and family also profoundly influenced state practices, political culture and the work performed by welfare professionals. Feminist historians such as María Angélica Illanes and Karin Rosemblatt, among many others, have long argued the need to place gender at the centre of labour and social history. In the next chapter, Yáñez Andrade turns to employers’ paternalism and welfare capitalism. He looks at different examples, including companies’ food-consumption programmes, cafeterias and vegetable gardens. The emblematic cases of paternalist companies, the coal mines in Lota, Concepción, and the paper-industry plants in the periphery of Santiago, illustrate the many ways in which employers regulated the time and space outside the walls of the factory. The last chapter provides a road map to studying free time and leisure activities.
In sum, El tiempo domesticado is a well-crafted and accessible book. Based on newspapers, magazines, employers’ publications, the Ministry of Labour records and the rich historiography about this period, Yáñez Andrade raises new questions for Latin American labour historians. Especially relevant is his proposal that studies of leisure and popular culture should also look into campaigns to reduce working hours, employers’ and state's efforts to discipline people, and larger discussions about consumption.
