The Sweat of Their Brow

David McCreery is to be commended for moving beyond the national borders that usually bind our studies of working people; he should be given credit for writing not of labor movements but of work itself. Perhaps most of all, McCreery deserves admiration for attempting what most historians would not risk—a serious synthesis, for even a serious synthesis will draw more criticism than praise.Having said that, in all honesty I have to say that this is a frustrating book to read and review. In the foreword, Robert Levine writes that McCreery’s work is “the first comprehensive analysis of labor system spanning the pre-Columbian period to the present” (p. vii). Levine’s assessment is both true and may serve as the book’s epitaph. The Sweat of Their Brow is about work, about making a living, which is the book’s appeal, but it is a book with too few distinctions. McCreery takes on both manual and intellectual work, work by the elites and work by the masses, rural work and urban work, artisans and industrial workers, both work itself and the social relations work engendered on and off the job. The author cannot possibly succeed, not in the less-than-two-hundred pages that the publisher (I assume) saw fit to finance, not without a Machiavellian organizational scheme that this book desperately needed, certainly not by attempting to describe and analyze five hundred years of work experience.In trying to do so much in such a short space, for example, McCreery cannot discuss skill in the Harry Braverman sense (Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century [1974]), although he sees the importance of “de-skilling” in the Mexican automobile plants of the 1970s. He cannot question E. P. Thompson’s conundrum of culture and class, as critical as this issue is to understanding the Latin American work experience. Indeed, because so few footnotes inhibit the readers progress, one must forego glimpsing most of the works that inspired McCreery’s often clear, even insightful but always agonizingly brief coverage of complex issues. McCreery writes, for example, of workers in small shops: “With limited capital, or forced to pay exorbitant rates for borrowed money, and without a market broad enough to easily absorb amortization costs, domestic producers could not afford the modern technology or machinery necessary to raise productivity and make their goods more competitive” (p. 132). This important paragraph ends with the conclusion that under those conditions workers had no sense of themselves as a “working class” and were drawn to either paternalism, or “an individualistic anarchism, as effective as police spies in dividing and weakening worker solidarity” (p. 133). And then he goes on to the next topic. Later he does the same with migrant workers, whose rural values he sees as detrimental to unionization, again a question of great importance crying out (in this case) for a comparative analysis of other region’s experience, a perspective which is almost totally lacking in this book.The brevity of his analysis often leads to confusion. In his conclusion he states that “A dominant characteristic of New World work relations has been a relative scarcity of labor” (p. 181). Then barely two paragraphs later, and equally provocatively (but rightly I believe), he writes that “For most of Latin America’s history, most labor outside the peasant sector has been coerced work, paid or not” (p. 182), followed almost immediately by an equally important observation that “The chief internal determinant of labor relations in Latin America has been the availability of a work force” (p. 182). As organizational themes, either one or all of these concepts would have been very useful. Coming as they did in rapid fire succession in his brief conclusion, they evoke an imagine of what this book might have been.But McCreery has also written a work of many small triumphs. In six terse paragraphs, he evocatively writes of a century of Bolivian tin miners, a feat that he replicates in his coverage of the maquiladoras, faithful to his determination to bring gender into the world of work. I know of no better broad historical coverage of women at work than in The Sweat of Their Brow. McCreery’s chapters on colonial era work are also quite good, perhaps because colonial labor systems are amenable to sparse generalizations. McCreery’s book contains insightful paragraphs on coffee production (contrasting Brazil with Costa Rica) and brief but important descriptions of “gathering” (for example, yerba mate and rubber tappers), of work in the automobile industry and in the “informal” sector and, throughout the book, good coverage of marginalized workers such as prostitutes and beggars.David J. McCreery has written a book that has long needed to be written, has given us tantalizing bits and pieces of what we need to know about work, yet for both obvious and obscure reasons has not finished the job. The Sweat of Their Brow is not what I had hoped it would be, but it is an agonizingly ambitious attempt to write the history of work in Latin America. Sometimes just to be first is good enough

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