Ángela Vergara has written a compelling, well-researched account of unemployment's human consequences and the Chilean state's efforts to relieve the suffering caused by cyclical economic crises. Drawing on records from Chile's Labor Department and the International Labor Organization (ILO), Vergara charts growing concern over unemployment in the early twentieth century, details government aid agencies' varied efforts to assist the poor and unemployed during the Great Depression, and shows how gains won in the late 1960s and early 1970s were undone by the Augusto Pinochet regime. A central question is how social workers, policymakers, and government officials defined unemployment. Vergara argues that although the Chilean state adopted international standards to fight unemployment, including the use of labor statistics and job placement programs, in practice “local economic, political, and social forces transformed and limited these reforms” (p. 6). Despite policies to mitigate the harm of mass layoffs, employment remained unstable and precarious for most Chilean workers.Three key themes emerge in the early chapters, which examine efforts to combat unemployment in the 1910s and 1920s in western Europe and Chile. The Chilean nitrate sector's boom-and-bust cycles shaped initial unemployment policies. The problem of unemployment was linked not to an industrialized workforce, as in the United States or western Europe, but to the instability of a primary export economy dependent on the world market. Second, Vergara shows how those creating unemployment policies were interested not just in helping workers but in controlling them. Aid was designed to curb workers' physical “degradation,” vagrancy, and radicalization while simultaneously preventing them from becoming dependent on assistance (p. 63). Male manual laborers and their families were often the presumed objects of unemployment aid; domestic, agricultural, and white-collar workers were excluded. Third, Vergara emphasizes that unemployment in Chile was a problem of mobility. When international market fluctuations caused mass layoffs in the northern nitrate sector, workers and their families fled south to seek work and shelter in their hometowns or large urban areas. Local elites, alarmed by the arrival of unemployed families, supported policies to control the movement of destitute workers.The heart of the book examines the Depression's impact on the unemployed and very poor in Chile, particularly during the intense economic crisis and political instability of the early 1930s. During the worst of the crisis, thousands were on the streets, in need of food and shelter. Three deeply researched chapters describe work relief programs, aid provision, and efforts to protect consumers in the early 1930s. Vergara clearly shows how unemployment aid was literally a matter of life and death. Aid workers—typically young, professional women trained at Chile's two social work institutes—were overwhelmed by the unemployment crisis's scale. One social work student, who handled some 500 cases per month, described aid seekers as “hungry, cold, dying” (quoted on p. 84). Vergara shows that, in Chile, efforts to protect consumers were not about mass consumption but about basic human subsistence. Various agencies enacted price controls on food, rent, utilities, and transportation, and the brief Socialist Republic (June–September 1932) created the Comisariato General de Subsistencias y Precios, which controlled prices for over ten years. Yet reforms to create a minimum wage and provide protection against unemployment were piecemeal. The laws were multiple, overlapping, and often not well enforced, and elite suspicions that the unemployed were lazy or needed character reeducation were widespread. In the end, only workers in certain limited circumstances were protected, such as in sectors with strong unions.In the 1960s labor rights expanded, especially in 1966 with the passage of a law that provided greater contract protections and job stability, but still fell short of protecting all workers. The 1966 law, for example, guaranteed 30 days' pay in case of severance for just cause, but employers could still fire workers without these protections to restructure or downsize. Moreover, rural and domestic workers continued to be excluded. Employment increased under Salvador Allende, but gains were undone by economic shock treatment in the mid-1970s and the 1982 crash. Moreover, the individualist ethos of the Pinochet years stigmatized aid for those who desperately needed it.Vergara admirably combines international perspectives on unemployment, particularly the principles set out by the ILO, with a story primarily rooted in Chile and its labor and social history. By showing how Chile participated in international conversations around unemployment policy, she underscores her argument that policies in Chile often fell short of international best practices. Vergara has gleaned an impressive amount of detail from Labor Department records, providing insight into working-class spaces from government-run shelters in cities to remote public works sites and company stores. Despite efforts to recover the perspectives of the poor, the chapters are occasionally dry, limited by the sources themselves and the bureaucratic nature of government reports and social workers' views of those seeking aid. At times the reader might also wish for a stronger line drawn between struggles in the past and unemployment crises in the present. These minor quibbles aside, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the limits of Chilean social and economic rights and will be of great interest to social and labor historians of Latin America.