The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy

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.