The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism Cleaners in the Global Economy

by Aguiar, Luis L. M.; Herod, Andrew

• ISBN13: 9781405156363
• ISBN10: 1405156368
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-18
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

In this collection of essays, an international group of scholars investigate the global building cleaning industry to reveal the extent of neoliberalism's impact on cleaners. This book provides the first intensive study focusing on building cleaners and their global experiences Brings together an international group of scholars and experts to investigate different national contexts and examples Draws out important commonalities and highlights significant differences in these experiences Examines topics including erosion of cleaners' industrial citizenship rights, the impact of outsourcing upon their working conditions, economic security, and the intensification of their work and its negative effects on physical health Considers how cleaners are mobilizing to resist and respond to the restructuring of their work.

Author Biography

Luis L.M. Aguiar researches neoliberalism and its impact on immigrant and minority workers in the Canadian building-cleaning industry. In addition, he writes on whiteness, racism and growing up immigrant in Montreal. At the moment, he is studying the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia and its changing hinterland status in the global economy. A research project on janitors’ internationalism is in development, as is a study of former Canadian boxing champion Eddie Melo and pop diva Nelly Furtado. He teaches globalization and labour, urban sociology, cultural studies, the sociology of tourism, racism, and qualitative methods.

Andrew Herod is Professor of Geography, Adjunct Professor of International Affairs, and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA. He has written widely on issues of globalisation and labour politics. He is the author of: Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism(2001), the editor of Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism (1998); and co-editor of Geographies of Power: Placing Scale(Blackwell Publishing 2002, with Melissa Wright) and of An Unruly World? Globalization, Governance and Geography (1998, with Gearóid Ó Tuathail, and Susan Roberts). He is presently writing a book on the global economy to be published by Blackwell Publishing.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Cleaners and the Dirty Work of Neoliberalism	p. 1
Introduction: Geographies of Neoliberalism	p. 11
Janitors and Sweatshop Citizenship in Canada	p. 16
Maria's Burden: Contract Cleaning and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Post-apartheid South Africa	p. 37
Restructuring the Architecture of State Regulation in the Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand Cleaning Industries and the Growth of Precarious Employment	p. 60
Manufacturing Modernity: Cleaning, Dirt, and Neoliberalism in Chile	p. 81
Introduction: Ethnographies of the Cleaning Body	p. 102
The Cleaners You Aren't Meant to See: Order, Hygiene and Everyday Politics in a Bangkok Shopping Mall	p. 106
Cleaning Up After Globalization: An Ergonomic Analysis of Work Activity of Hotel Cleaners	p. 129
Work Design and the Labouring Body: Examining the Impacts of Work Organization on Danish Cleaners' Health	p. 150
Introduction: Cleaners' Agency	p. 172
Cleaners' Organizing in Britain from the 1970s: A Personal Account	p. 177
The Privatization of Health Care Cleaning Services in Southwestern British Columbia, Canada: Union Responses to Unprecedented Government Actions	p. 195
Justice for Janitors: Scales of Organizing and Representing Workers	p. 214
Notes on Contributors	p. 235
Index	p. 239
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