What role can unions in the developing world play in the era of globalisation? Taking the case of Brazilian labour unions since the transition to democracy in the mid-1980s, Marieke Riethof gives a nuanced answer: despite constraints on union activity, Brazilian labour was able to play an important role throughout the years of the transition. But beginning with the reforms of the 1990s and the eventual success of the Plano Real in controlling inflation in 1994, labour's ability to play a proactive role in shaping the reform agenda into the late 1990s and beyond was out-manoeuvred.

The book's early chapters go over some well-known material, reiterating the conclusions of earlier scholars on Brazil's new unionism and the founding of the Workers' Party. The story of the renewal, emergence and strengthening of Brazilian industrial unionism is here retold through secondary materials and some key informant interviews on the history of Brazilian labour since the early 1980s. Riethof reminds us that the growing dynamism and strength of the Brazilian labour movement through the transition period should be seen as somewhat of a surprise. The appearance of the New Unionism, the connections with social movements and the Workers' Party, and organisational innovations like the founding of the CUT, Brazil's radical labour federation, are all seen as part of the growing vitality of labour in the period.

The most interesting parts of the book are the chapters that analyse the labour movement's failure to find a place in the economic decision-making of the stabilisation reforms in the early 1990s and the subsequent slide into decreasing voice in these matters through the Real reforms and then the wave of privatisations. Here the story takes a second turn: instead of democratic deepening and the increase of labour rights, as might be expected following the democratic transition, the 1990s were a period of defensive moves to try to protect workers from increasingly precarious arrangements as labour rights were dismantled in the period. The story is told largely through careful analysis of CUT documents and statistical data about labour's fortunes in the period.

The 1990s were difficult for labour in Brazil for a number of reasons, principally the inability of CUT to either prevent or impact in any meaningful way the series of reforms that were implemented in the decade. Earlier modes of engagement centred around strikes proved inefficient, particularly after Plano Real. This both lowered inflation – which was well received by the Brazilian majority-making labour's opposition to it more difficult, and eventually failed to arrest growing unemployment, which tended to weaken labour further. This paved the way for the dismantling of some labour regulations – such as with the introduction of the flexible ‘Work Hours Bank’ and the federal government's increasingly aggressive posture toward labour. An alternative, politically more conservative labour federation appears in the latter part of the decade to compete with CUT's hegemony among organised workers. Finally, the CUT's opposition to privatisations did little to arrest their progress in the decade.

Some of the CUT's new strategies in the period are analysed in the book, such as the attempt to organise state-level unions or national sectoral unions, and the CUT's increased global connections, including its contentious decision to participate in the cold-war era International Federation of Christian Trade Unions. Unfortunately the analysis in the book of these innovations is quite short, limited to a few pages, and other innovations, like the CUT's participation in the World Social Forum, or the increasing electoral fortunes of the Workers' Party in the late 1990s, receive only passing mention. The latter is not a trivial development – an alternative analysis to the one in the book might be that labour invested its political energies on achieving representation via the Workers' Party throughout the decade, a strategy that follows the developments of the 1990s of a broadly-oriented labour movement and is a response to failures to achieve progress via shop-floor strategies. Of course, in retrospect whether this was ultimately beneficial to labour is an open question.

The book's careful and subtle discussion of the responses of labour to economic reforms in the 1990s is an important contribution to the literature, especially as it is anchored in primary research of historical documents from the period. The analysis of these is unfortunately short and limited to two chapters and this brevity limits the impact of the book.