Luis L.M. Aguiar / Andrew Herod (eds.)

The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism

Cleaners in the Global Economy
Herausgeber: Aguiar, Luis L M; Herod, Andrew

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Although they remain largely invisible in the prevailing literature, building cleaners are being affected tremendously by neoliberalism's grip on the reorganization of contemporary work and labour markets. In this collection of essays, an international group of scholars investigates the global building cleaning industry to reveal the extent of neoliberalism's impact on cleaners. The first comprehensive study of building cleaners and their experiences of labour market and work restructuring in the global economy, the book's varied topics examine the erosion of cleaners' industrial citizenship rights, the impact of outsourcing upon their working conditions and economic (in) security, and how intensification of their work is having negative effects on their physical and mental health. Importantly, it also includes a number of essays which discuss various mobilising strategies in which cleaners are engaging to resist the pains of neoliberalism. With a spatial focus that ranges from the cleaning of universities and shopping malls to that of hotels and hospitals, the collection puts front and centre a workforce that is often much maligned by society and ignored by the academic and popular literature, but a workforce which is nevertheless increasingly asserting itself as it attempts to resist neoliberal globalisation.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Wiley
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. Dezember 2006
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 399g
• ISBN-13: 9781405156363
• ISBN-10: 1405156368
• Artikelnr.: 21361013

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: Cleaners and the Dirty Work of Neoliberalism (AndrewHerod and Luis L M Aguiar).

SECTION 1.

1. Introduction: Geographies of Neoliberalism (Andrew Herod andLuis L M Aguiar).

2. Janitors and Sweatshop Citizenship in Canada (Luis L MAguiar).

3. Maria's Burden: Contract Cleaning and the Crisis ofSocial Reproduction in Post-Apartheid South Africa (AndriesBezuidenhout and Khayaat Fakier).

4. Restructuring the Architecture of State Regulation in theAustralian and Aotearoa/New Zealand Cleaning Industries and theGrowth of Precarious Employment (Shaun Ryan and Andrew Herod).

5. Manufacturing Modernity: Cleaning, Dirt, and Neoliberalism inChile (Patricia Tomic, Ricardo Trumper and Rodrigo HidalgoDattwyler).

SECTION 2.

6. Introduction: Ethnographies of the Cleaning Body (AndrewHerod and Luis L M Aguiar).

7. The Cleaners You Aren't Meant to See: Order, Hygieneand Everyday Politics in a Bangkok Shopping Mall (AlysonBrody).

8. Cleaning Up After Globalization: An Ergonomic Analysis ofWork Activity of Hotel Cleaners (Ana María Seifert and KarenMessing).

9. Work Design and the Labouring Body: Examining the Impacts ofWork Organization on Danish Cleaners' Health (KarenSögaard, Anne Katrine Blangsted, Andrew Herod and LotteFinsen).

10. Introduction: Cleaners' Agency (Andrew Herod and LuisL M Aguiar).

11. Cleaners' Organizing in Britain from the 1970s: APersonal Account (Sheila Rowbotham).

12. The Privatization of Health Care Cleaning Services inSouthwestern British Columbia, Canada: Union Responses toUnprecedented Government Actions (Marcy Cohen).

13. Justice for Janitors: Scales of Organizing and RepresentingWorkers (Lydia Savage).

Notes on Contributors.

Index.

Rezensionen

"An important collection drawing attention to the invisible workerswhose work it is to fashion the visible.... The debates raised inthis volume could be developed in many directions and it is no badthing that we are left wanting more." (Geographical Journal,September 2008)

"Outhwaite's familiarity with his subject matter isunquestionable, as is his desire to cover it thoroughly, and thebook will serve well as a guide for philosophers to the mostimportant work done by theoretical sociologists on the nature ofsociety." (Philosophy In Review)

"The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism offers a variedand insightful examination of the global restructuring of thecleaning industry and its implications for workers and theirstruggles. It offers a good mix of more structural andpoststructural perspectives on these processes and their inherentlyscalar nature. Moreover, many of its most effective chapters, suchas those by Bezuidenhuit and Fakier, show how work and socialreproduction are strongly interrelated." (Annals of theAssociation of American Geographers)"Subcontracted cleaners are on the front line of contemporarycapitalism. This important collection celebrates their labour,their humanity and their resistance."
-Jane Wills, Queen Mary, University of London

"In this excellent collection Aguiar and Herod capture theglobal dimension of a mundane type of work that until recently wasinvisible to most observers but which has recently emerged as a keynode of new organizing. As the articles in this volume demonstrate,all the classic issues that have sparked labor protest throughoutthe history of capitalism are present in the work of cleaners -wages, working conditions, health and safety, and perhaps mostimportant, human dignity."
-Ruth Milkman, University of California, LosAngeles