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Better Must Come: Exiting Homelessness in Two Global Cities

Matthew D. Marr

This book reveals how social contexts at various levels combine and interact to shape the experiences of transitional housing program users in two of the most prosperous cities of the global economy, ... More

This book reveals how social contexts at various levels combine and interact to shape the experiences of transitional housing program users in two of the most prosperous cities of the global economy, Los Angeles and Tokyo. This is the first book to directly focus on exits from homelessness in American or Japanese cities, and it is the first targeted comparison of homelessness in two global cities. The book argues that homelessness should be understood primarily as a socially generated, traumatic, and stigmatizing predicament, rather than as a stable condition, identity, or culture. It pushes for movement away from the study of “homeless people” and “homeless culture” toward an understanding of homelessness as a condition that can be transcended at individual and societal levels. The book prescribes policy changes to end homelessness that include expanding subsidized housing to persons without disabilities and experiencing homelessness chronically, as well as taking broader measures to address vulnerabilities produced by labor markets, housing markets, and the rapid deterioration of social safety nets that often results from neoliberal globalization.Less

Building Power from Below: Chilean Workers Take On Walmart

Carolina Bank Muñoz

Building Power from Below analyzes the success of Walmart workers in Chile. Retail and warehouse workers have achieved the seemingly unachievable. They have organized Walmart. How do we explain ... More

Building Power from Below analyzes the success of Walmart workers in Chile. Retail and warehouse workers have achieved the seemingly unachievable. They have organized Walmart. How do we explain workers’ success in Chile, the cradle of neoliberalism, in challenging the world’s largest and most antiunion corporation? Chilean workers have spent years building grass roots organizations committed to principles of union democracy. While both retail and warehouse workers have successful unions, they have built different organizations due to their industry, workforce, and political histories. The independent retail worker unions are best characterized by what I call flexible militancy. These unions have less structural power, but have significant associational and symbolic power. While they have made notable bread and butter gains, their most notable successes have been in fighting for respect and dignity on the job. Warehouse workers by contrast have significant structural power. Their unions are best characterized by what I call strategic democracy. Their structural power has offered them the opportunity to “map production” and build strategic capacity. They have been especially successful in economic gains. While the model in Chile cannot necessarily be reproduced in different countries, we can certainly gain insights from their approaches, tactics, and strategies.Less

Buoyancy on the Bayou: Shrimpers Face the Rising Tide of Globalization

Jill Ann Harrison

Over the past few decades, shrimp has transformed from a luxury food to a kitchen staple. While shrimp-loving consumers have benefited from the lower cost of shrimp, domestic shrimp fishers have ... More

Over the past few decades, shrimp has transformed from a luxury food to a kitchen staple. While shrimp-loving consumers have benefited from the lower cost of shrimp, domestic shrimp fishers have suffered, particularly in Louisiana. Most of the shrimp that we eat today is imported from shrimp farms in China, Vietnam, and Thailand. The flood of imported shrimp has sent dockside prices plummeting, and rising fuel costs have destroyed the profit margin for shrimp fishing as a domestic industry. This book portrays the struggles that Louisiana shrimp fishers endure to remain afloat in an industry beset by globalization. The book offers a portrait of shrimp fishers' lives just before the BP oil spill in 2010, which helps us better understand what has happened since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It shows that shrimp fishers go through a careful calculation of noneconomic costs and benefits as they grapple to figure out what their next move will be. Many willingly forgo opportunities in other industries to fulfill what they perceive as their cultural calling. Others reluctantly leave fishing behind for more lucrative work, but they mourn the loss of a livelihood upon which community and family structures are built. In this account of the struggle to survive amid the waves of globalization, the book focuses the analysis at the intersection of livelihood, family, and community and casts a bright light upon the cultural importance of the work that we do.Less

The Caring Self: The Work Experiences of Home Care Aides

Clare L. Stacey

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 1.7 million home health aides and personal and home care aides in the United States as of 2008. These home care aides are rapidly ... More

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 1.7 million home health aides and personal and home care aides in the United States as of 2008. These home care aides are rapidly becoming the backbone of America's system of long-term care, and their numbers continue to grow. Often referred to as frontline care providers or direct care workers, home care aides—disproportionately women of color—bathe, feed, and offer companionship to the elderly and disabled in the context of the home. This book draws on observations of and interviews with aides working in Ohio and California to explore the physical and emotional labor associated with the care of others. Aides experience material hardships and find themselves negotiating social norms and affective rules associated with both family and work. This has negative implications for workers who struggle to establish clear limits on their emotional labor in the intimate space of the home. Aides often find themselves giving more, staying longer, even paying out of pocket for patient medications or incidentals; in other words, they feel emotional obligations expected more often of family members than of employees. However, there are also positive outcomes: some aides form meaningful ties to elderly and disabled patients. This sense of connection allows them to establish a sense of dignity and social worth in a socially devalued job. The case of home care allows us to see the ways in which emotional labor can simultaneously have deleterious and empowering consequences for workers.Less

Casino Women: Courage in Unexpected Places

Susan Chandler and Jill B. Jones

This is a pioneering look at the female face of corporate gaming. The book describes a world whose enormous profitability is dependent on the labor of women assigned stereotypically female ... More

This is a pioneering look at the female face of corporate gaming. The book describes a world whose enormous profitability is dependent on the labor of women assigned stereotypically female occupations. But behind the neon lies another world, peopled by thousands of remarkable women who assert their humanity in the face of gaming empires' relentless quest for profits. The casino women profiled here generally fall into two groups. Geoconda Arguello Kline, typical of the first, arrived in the United States in the 1980s fleeing the war in Nicaragua. Finding work as a Las Vegas hotel maid, she overcame her initial fear of organizing and joined with others to build the preeminent grassroots union in the nation—the 60,000-member Culinary Union—becoming in time its president. In Las Vegas, “the hottest union city in America,” the collective actions of union activists have won economic and political power for tens of thousands of working Nevadans and their families. The story of these women's transformation and their success in creating a union able to face off against global gaming giants forms the centerpiece of this book. Another group of women, dealers and middle managers among them, did not act. Fearful of losing their jobs, they remained silent, declining to speak out when others were abused, and in the case of middle managers, taking on the corporations' goals as their own. The book appraises the cost of their silence and examines the factors that pushed some women into activism and led others to accept the status quo.Less

The Challenge to Change: Reforming Health Care on the Front Line in the United States and the United Kingdom

Rebecca Kolins Givan

There is constant pressure on hospitals to improve health care delivery and increase cost effectiveness. New initiatives are the order of the day in the dramatically different health care systems of ... More

There is constant pressure on hospitals to improve health care delivery and increase cost effectiveness. New initiatives are the order of the day in the dramatically different health care systems of the United States and Great Britain. Often these efforts are not successful. This book analyzes the successes and failures of efforts to improve hospitals and explains what factors make it likely that the implementation of reforms will be rewarded by positive transformation in a particular institution's day-to-day operation. The book's in-depth qualitative case studies of both top-down initiatives and changes first suggested by staff on the front lines of care point clearly to the importance of all hospital workers in effecting change and even influencing national policy. The book illuminates the critical role of workers, managers, and unions in enabling or constraining changes in policies and procedures and ensuring their implementation. It spotlights an Anglo-American model of hospital care and work organization, even while these countries retain their differences in access and payment. Entrenched professional roles, hierarchical workplace organization, and the sometimes-detached view of policymakers all shape the prospects for change in hospitals. The book provides important examples of how the dedication and imagination of the people who work in hospitals can make all the difference when it comes to providing quality health care even in a challenging economic environment.Less

The Chicken Trail: Following Workers, Migrants, and Corporations across the Americas

Kathleen C. Schwartzman

This book examines the impact of globalization—and of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in particular—on the North American poultry industry, focusing on the displacement of African ... More

This book examines the impact of globalization—and of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in particular—on the North American poultry industry, focusing on the displacement of African American workers in the southeast United States and workers in Mexico. The book documents how the transformation of U.S. poultry production in the 1980s increased its export capacity and changed the nature and consequences of labor conflict. It documents how globalization, and especially NAFTA, forced Mexico to open its commodity and capital markets, and eliminate state support of corporations and rural smallholders. As a consequence, many Mexicans were forced to abandon their no-longer-sustainable small farms, with some seeking work in industrialized poultry factories north of the border. By following this trail, the book breaks through the deadlocked immigration debate, highlighting the broader economic and political contexts of immigration flows. The narrative that undocumented workers take jobs that Americans don't want to do is too simplistic. The book argues instead that illegal immigration is better understood as a labor story in which the hiring of undocumented workers is part of a management response to the crises of profit making and labor-management conflict. The book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the implications of globalization for labor and how the externalities of free trade and neoliberalism become the social problems of nations and the tragedies of individuals.Less

Cities for Profit: The Real Estate Turn in Asia's Urban Politics

Gavin Shatkin

In the past three decades, urban real estate megaprojects—massive, master planned, for profit urban developments—have captured the imagination of politicians and policy-makers across Asia. This book ... More

In the past three decades, urban real estate megaprojects—massive, master planned, for profit urban developments—have captured the imagination of politicians and policy-makers across Asia. This book argues that state actors have been major drivers of these transformative projects, and have realized them through increasingly aggressive efforts to reclaim or acquire land, and to transfer land rights to corporate developers. State actors have specifically sought to monetize land as a strategy of state empowerment, a means to generate budget revenue, distribute patronage, and drive economic growth. This newly assertive state role in land markets constitutes the real estate turn in urban politics in the subtitle of the book. This real estate turn has significant implications for social, political, and ecological change in these societies. The book explores the varied spatial impacts of this real estate turn in three cities—Jakarta, Kolkata, and Chongqing—that differ in their systems of property rights and urban governance.Less

Cleaning Up: How Hospital Outsourcing Is Hurting Workers and Endangering Patients

Dan Zuberi

To cut costs and maximize profits, hospitals in the United States and many other countries are outsourcing such tasks as cleaning and food preparation to private contractors. To examine this ... More

To cut costs and maximize profits, hospitals in the United States and many other countries are outsourcing such tasks as cleaning and food preparation to private contractors. To examine this transformation in the healthcare industry, this book looks at the consequences of outsourcing from two perspectives: its impact on patient safety and its role in increasing socioeconomic inequality. The book argues that outsourcing has been disastrous for the cleanliness of hospitals—leading to an increased risk of hospital-acquired infections, a leading cause of severe illness and death—as well as for the effective delivery of other hospital services and the workers themselves. Interviews with the low-wage workers who keep hospitals running uncover claims of exposure to near-constant risk of injury and illness. Many report serious concerns about the quality of the work due to understaffing, high turnover, poor training and experience, inadequate cleaning supplies, and on-the-job injuries. The book also presents policy recommendations for improving patient safety by reducing the risk of hospital-acquired infection and ameliorating the work conditions and quality of life of hospital support workers. It makes the case that hospital outsourcing exemplifies the trend towards “low-road” service-sector jobs that threatens to undermine society's social health, as well as the physical health and well-being of patients in health care settings globally.Less

A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment

Carrie M. Lane

Being laid off can be a traumatic event. The unemployed worry about how they will pay their bills and find a new job. In the American economy's boom-and-bust business cycle since the 1980s, repeated ... More

Being laid off can be a traumatic event. The unemployed worry about how they will pay their bills and find a new job. In the American economy's boom-and-bust business cycle since the 1980s, repeated layoffs have become part of working life. This book finds that the new culture of corporate employment, changes to the job search process, and dual-income marriage have reshaped how today's skilled workers view unemployment. Through interviews with seventy-five unemployed and underemployed high-tech white-collar workers in the Dallas area over the course of the 2000s, the book shows that they have embraced a new definition of employment in which all jobs are temporary and all workers are, or should be, independent “companies of one.” Following the experiences of individual jobseekers over time, the book explores the central role that organized networking events, working spouses, and neoliberal ideology play in forging and reinforcing a new individualist, pro-market response to the increasingly insecure nature of contemporary employment. It also explores how this new perspective is transforming traditional ideas about masculinity and the role of men as breadwinners. Sympathetic to the benefits that this “company of one” ideology can hold for its adherents, the book also details how it hides the true costs of an insecure workforce and makes collective and political responses to job loss and downward mobility unlikely.Less

Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston

Shannon Gleeson

This book goes beyond the debate over federal immigration policy to examine the complicated terrain of immigrant worker rights. Federal law requires that basic labor standards apply to all workers, ... More

This book goes beyond the debate over federal immigration policy to examine the complicated terrain of immigrant worker rights. Federal law requires that basic labor standards apply to all workers, yet this principle clashes with increasingly restrictive immigration laws and creates a confusing bureaucratic terrain for local policymakers and labor advocates. The book examines this issue in two of the largest immigrant gateways in the country: San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas. The book reveals two cities with very different approaches to addressing the exploitation of immigrant workers—both involving the strategic coordination of a range of bureaucratic brokers, but in strikingly different ways. Drawing on the real-life accounts of ordinary workers, federal, state, and local government officials, community organizers, and consular staff, the book argues that local political contexts matter for protecting undocumented workers in particular. Providing a rich description of the bureaucratic minefields of labor law, and the explosive politics of immigrant rights, the book shows how the lessons learned from San Jose and Houston can inform models for upholding labor and human rights in the United States.Less

Coping with Adversity: Regional Economic Resilience and Public Policy

Harold Wolman, Howard Wial, Travis St. Clair, and Edward Hill

The book analyses two different forms of economic adversity faced by urban regions – external shocks and chronic economic distress. It then examines whether and why some regions are resilient to ... More

The book analyses two different forms of economic adversity faced by urban regions – external shocks and chronic economic distress. It then examines whether and why some regions are resilient to these different forms of adversity while others are not. The study includes quantitative analyses of the experience of all metropolitan areas from 1978-2014, including a special analysis of the Great Recession. It also includes intensive case studies of six regions. The case studies focus on the problems faced by each of the regions and the public policies adopted to deal with these problems. Two chapters are then devoted to an in depth discussion of whether the most common policies and/or practices employed were likely to have been successful. The final chapter asks what we can expect of explicit economic development policies as contributors to resilience and what are the lessons for economic development policy makers and practitioners?Less

Disintegrating Democracy at Work: Labor Unions and the Future of Good Jobs in the Service Economy

Virginia Doellgast

The shift from manufacturing- to service-based economies has often been accompanied by the expansion of low-wage and insecure employment. Many consider the effects of this shift inevitable. This book ... More

The shift from manufacturing- to service-based economies has often been accompanied by the expansion of low-wage and insecure employment. Many consider the effects of this shift inevitable. This book contends that high pay and good working conditions are possible even for marginal service jobs. This outcome, however, depends on strong labor unions and encompassing collective bargaining institutions, which are necessary to give workers a voice in the decisions that affect the design of their jobs and the distribution of productivity gains. The book's conclusions are based on a comparative study of the changes that occurred in the organization of call center jobs in the United States and Germany following the liberalization of telecommunications markets. The research found that German managers more often took the “high road” than those in the United States, investing in skills and giving employees more control over their work. The book traces the difference to stronger institutional supports for workplace democracy in Germany. However, these democratic structures were increasingly precarious, as managers in both countries used outsourcing strategies to move jobs to workplaces with lower pay and weaker or no union representation. The book's findings show the importance of policy choices in closing off these escape routes, promoting broad access to good jobs in expanding service industries.Less

Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal

Michael A. McCarthy

Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, this book ... More

Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, this book argues that the critical driver was policymakers' reactions to capitalist crises and their political imperative to promote capitalist growth. Pension development has followed three paths of marketization in America since the New Deal, each distinct but converging: occupational pension plans were adopted as an alternative to real increases in Social Security benefits after World War II; private pension assets were then financialized and invested into the stock market; and, since the 1970s, traditional pension plans have come to be replaced with riskier retirement plans. Comparing each episode of change, the book mounts a forceful challenge to common understandings of America's private pension system and offers an alternative political economy of the welfare state. The book weaves together a theoretical framework that helps to explain pension marketization with structural mechanisms that push policymakers to intervene to promote capitalist growth and avoid capitalist crises and contingent historical factors that both drive them to intervene in the particular ways they do and shape how their interventions bear on welfare change. By emphasizing the capitalist context in which policymaking occurs, the book turns our attention to the structural factors that drive policy change. The book urges the reader to reconsider how capitalism itself constrains policymaking.Less

Divining without Seeds: The Case for Strengthening Laboratory Medicine in Africa

Iruka N. Okeke

Infectious disease is the most common cause of illness and death in Africa, yet health practitioners routinely fail to identify causative microorganisms in most patients. As a result, patients often ... More

Infectious disease is the most common cause of illness and death in Africa, yet health practitioners routinely fail to identify causative microorganisms in most patients. As a result, patients often do not receive the right medicine in time to cure them promptly even when such medicine is available, outbreaks are larger and more devastating than they should be, and the impact of control interventions is difficult to measure. Wrong prescriptions and prolonged infections amount to needless costs for patients and for health systems. This book argues that laboratory diagnostics are essential to the effective practice of medicine in Africa. The diversity of endemic life-threatening infections and limited public health resources in tropical Africa make the need for basic laboratory diagnostic support even more acute than in other parts of the world. This book gathers compelling case studies of inadequate diagnoses of diseases ranging from fevers to respiratory infections and sexually transmitted diseases. The inherited and widely prevalent health clinic model, which excludes or diminishes the hospital laboratory, is flawed, to often devastating effect. Fortunately, there are new technologies that make it possible to inexpensively implement testing at the primary care level. The book makes clear that routine use of appropriate diagnostic support should be part of every drug-delivery plan in Africa and that diagnostic development should be given high priority.Less

From the Outside In: Suburban Elites, Third-Sector Organizations, and the Reshaping of Philadelphia

Carolyn T. Adams

This book addresses the role of suburban elites in setting development agendas for urban municipalities and their larger metropolitan regions. It shows how major nongovernmental, nonmarket ... More

This book addresses the role of suburban elites in setting development agendas for urban municipalities and their larger metropolitan regions. It shows how major nongovernmental, nonmarket institutions are taking responsibility for reshaping Philadelphia, led by suburban and state elites who sit on boards and recruit like-minded suburban colleagues to join them. In Philadelphia and other American cities, Third-Sector organizations have built and expanded hospitals, universities, research centers, performing arts venues, museums, parks, and waterfronts, creating whole new districts that are expanding outward from the city's historic downtown. The book argues that suburban elites have recognized the importance of the central city to their own future and have intervened to redevelop central city land and institutions. Suburban interests and state allies have channeled critical investments in downtown development and K–12 education. The book contrasts those suburban priorities with transportation infrastructure and neighborhood redevelopment, two policy domains in which suburban elites display less strategic engagement. The book is a rich examination of the promise and difficulty of governance that is increasingly distinct from elected government and thus divorced from the usual means of democratic control within an urban municipality.Less

Ghostworkers and Greens: The Cooperative Campaigns of Farmworkers and Environmentalists for Pesticide Reform

Adam Tompkins

Throughout the twentieth century, despite compelling evidence that some pesticides posed a threat to human and environmental health, growers and the United States Department of Agriculture continued ... More

Throughout the twentieth century, despite compelling evidence that some pesticides posed a threat to human and environmental health, growers and the United States Department of Agriculture continued to favor agricultural chemicals over cultural and biological forms of pest control. This book reveals a history of cooperation between farmworker groups and environmental organizations. The separate movements shared a common concern about the effects of pesticides on human health. This enabled bridge-builders within the disparate organizations to foster cooperative relationships around issues of mutual concern to share information, resources, and support. Nongovernmental organizations played a key role in pesticide reform. For nearly fifty years, these groups served as educators, communicating to the public scientific and experiential information about the adverse effects of pesticides on human health and the environment, and built support for the amendment of pesticide policies and the alteration of pesticide use practices. Their efforts led to the passage of more stringent regulations to better protect farmworkers, the public, and the environment. Environmental organizations and farmworker groups also acted as watchdogs, monitoring the activity of regulatory agencies to ensure that they fulfilled their responsibilities to the public. These groups served as not only lobbyists but also essential components of successful democratic governance, ensuring public participation and more effective policy implementation.Less

Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing

Jamie K. McCallum

News about labor unions is usually pessimistic, focusing on declining membership and failed campaigns. But there are encouraging signs that the labor movement is evolving its strategies to benefit ... More

News about labor unions is usually pessimistic, focusing on declining membership and failed campaigns. But there are encouraging signs that the labor movement is evolving its strategies to benefit workers in rapidly changing global economic conditions. This book tells the story of the most successful and aggressive campaign ever waged by workers across national borders. It begins in the United States in 2007 as Service Employees International Union's (SEIU) struggled to organize private security guards at Group 4 Securicor (G4S), a global security services company that is the second largest employer in the world. Failing in its bid, SEIU changed course and sought allies in other countries in which G4S operated. Its efforts resulted in wage gains, benefits increases, new union formations, and an end to management reprisals in many countries throughout the Global South, though close attention is focused on developments in South Africa and India. The book looks beyond these achievements to probe the meaning of some of the less visible aspects of the campaign. The book reveals several paradoxes. Although global unionism is typically concerned with creating parity and universal standards across borders, local context can both undermine and empower the intentions of global actors, creating varied and uneven results. At the same time, despite being generally regarded as weaker than their European counterparts, U.S. unions are in the process of remaking the global labor movement in their own image. The book suggests that changes in political economy have encouraged unions to develop new ways to organize workers.Less

Heinrich Kaan's "Psychopathia Sexualis" (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality

Heinrich Kaan

Benjamin A. Haynes (ed.)

Heinrich Kaan’s fascinating work—part medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tract—takes us back to the origins of sexology. He links the sexual ... More

Heinrich Kaan’s fascinating work—part medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tract—takes us back to the origins of sexology. He links the sexual instinct to the imagination for the first time, creating what Foucault called “a unified field of sexual abnormality.” Kaan’s taxonomy consists of six sexual aberrations: masturbation, pederasty, lesbian love, necrophilia, bestiality, and the violation of statues. Kaan not only inaugurated the field of sexology, but played a significant role in the regimes of knowledge production and discipline about psychiatric and sexual subjects. As the book’s editor argues in the Introduction, Kaan’s text crucially enables us to see how homosexuality replaced masturbation as the central concern of Euro-American sexual regulation. Kaan’s work (translated into English for the first time here) opens a new window onto the history of sexuality and the history of sexology and reconfigures our understanding of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s book of the same name, published some forty years later.Less

High Tech and High Touch: Headhunting, Technology, and Economic Transformation

James E. Coverdill and William Finlay

This book examines headhunting—contingency recruiting—in the wake of two profound changes in the labor market. The first is the emergence and explosive rise of various forms of social media, most ... More

This book examines headhunting—contingency recruiting—in the wake of two profound changes in the labor market. The first is the emergence and explosive rise of various forms of social media, most prominently LinkedIn, which have made information about employers, jobs, and job-seekers much more widely available. The second is the unraveling of internal labor markets and the fraying of the ties between employers and employees, which started in the 1980s and 1990s, and accelerated in the wake of the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the Great Recession. Both changes created the possibility that employers and candidates would be able to find each other without the benefit of labor-market intermediaries like headhunters. The book explains why headhunting survived these changes: employers still need headhunters to find good candidates quickly. In a high-tech world, it is relatively easy to find large numbers of apparently qualified prospective candidates. Headhunters, however, determine which of these prospects are truly viable candidates and they invest time and effort in converting prospects into candidates. They bring high-touch search to a high-tech labor market.Less