Joel Wolfe’s book offers an imaginative reappraisal of labor organizing among workers in São Paulo’s textile and metalworking industries. According to Wolfe, shop-level “factory commissions,” formed in the 1910s by women textile workers, came to have an enormous influence over paulista labor organizations. Outcasts from the male-dominated world of most unions and leftist associations like the anarchists and the Communists, female textile workers formed commissions to confront management collectively with their demands for improved treatment and wages. While few male unionists fully appreciated the women’s efforts, the resilience of the commissions eventually persuaded the male leadership to integrate the commissions into the formal union structure. The commissions proved so stable that today they remain a building block of Brazil’s industrial relations system, popular among supporters of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores).
Through oral histories, employer documents, newspaper accounts, and diplomatic reports, Wolfe’s book persuasively demonstrates the factory commissions’ important role at various moments of conflict, such as São Paulo’s explosive 1917 and 1953 general strikes. The commissions also proved an essential organizing space for industrial workers during the repressive years of the Estado Nôvo (1937–45) and its aftermath (1946–50).
While Working Women, Working Men is not the first book to note the importance of shop-level organizing in São Paulo, Wolfe is the first to discuss the early factory commissions as if they were permanent institutional entities. He is also unique in his insistence on the centrality of female textile workers to Brazil’s industrial working class. On neither of these points, however, is the book entirely persuasive. Although the commissions are the book’s protagonists, their institutional history here is troubled by a lack of detail. The book rarely investigates the day-to-day life of the commissions, and the reader comes to know few people who participated in them. Despite the author’s sympathy for workers and grassroots organizations, the book fails to put flesh on the bones of either, and leaves the reader wondering if the commissions were little more than spontaneously organized delegations of workers—the kind of clutch of disgruntled workers that has taken shape to confront employers since the beginning of time.
The book is equally disappointing when it comes to making the women’s case. Their predominance on textile factory commissions is supported primarily by a 1912 census of 31 textile mills and the impressions of various informants. These sources lead Wolfe to assign a sexual identity to certain strategies, as in “male … workers increasingly adopted women workers’ organization techniques (i.e., reliance on independent factory commissions)” (p. 158). It is never clear, however, that men were not already using those sorts of techniques. Moreover, the examination of the issues that divided male and female workers is restricted to workplace dynamics and politics, leaving out a thorough analysis of how gender roles beyond the factory gates have impinged on the rise of Brazil’s industrial working class. While Working Women, Working Men contributes much valuable information to Brazilian labor history, its provocative thesis needs work.
