Nik Theodore

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• Professor at University of Illinois Chicago

With a focus on developments in North America and Europe, this essay explores three dimensions of neoliberal urbanism in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. It begins by examining austerity as neoliberal strategy, highlighting the ways that austerity measures reorganize the institutional matrix of the state, with socially regressive...

Day-labor markets are characterized by chronic instability, low pay, and weak institutional protections against violations of labor standards. In the U.S., worker centers address these conditions through the operation of hiring halls that dispatch workers, set minimum wages, and redress wage theft. Surveys conducted in Seattle in 2012 and 2015 were...

For nearly a half century, questions of why and how firms navigate the “make-buy” decision have animated fields as varied as industrial relations and economic geography. The idea of “core competencies” became the dominant explanation of corporate decision-making processes, where any activity deemed outside of the central specializations of the firm...

Faced with extraordinarily high unemployment, the long-term unemployed in South Africa increasingly have been securing livelihoods outside of standard waged work. Many are establishing unregistered, micro-enterprises that provide low-cost goods and services to low-income households. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study of unregis...

Day-labor worker centers are labor market intermediaries that target their interventions to underregulated segments of residential construction and allied industries. As sites of rulemaking in the informal economy, worker centers raise standards and enforce worker protections in sectors that lie beyond the reach of government enforcement. In additi...

Cahier 7 reports on the roundtable discussion organized and convened by Angeliki Paidakaki within the frame of the RC21 Conference “Ordinary Cities in Exceptional Times” that took place between the 24th and 26th of August, 2022, in Athens (Greece). Angeliki facilitated exchanges between scholars and practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic o...

Background: We characterized informally employed US domestic workers' (DWers) exposure to patterns of workplace hazards, as well as to single hazards, and examined associations with DWers' work-related and general health. Methods: We analyzed cross-sectional data from the sole nationwide survey of informally employed US DWers with work-related h...

This report examines the activities of the worker centers that are funded through the New York City Day Laborer Workforce Initiative, an innovative city-funded program that supports the workforce development activities of these organizations.

Objectives We characterized informally employed US domestic workers’ (DWers) exposure to patterns of workplace hazards, as well as singular hazards, and examined associations with DWers’ work-related and general health. Methods We analyzed cross-sectional data from the sole nationwide survey of informally employed US DWers with work-related hazard...

Introduction: Few studies, mostly descriptive, have quantitatively analyzed the working conditions of domestic workers (DWers) informally employed by private households in the USA. These workers are explicitly or effectively excluded from numerous workplace protections, and scant data exist on their exposures or how best to categorize them. Metho...

As part of ILR Review’s new special series “Novel Technologies at Work,” this article introduces a forum composed of five industry studies that examine the drivers and impact of recent and impending technological change. Each of the studies, condensed from longer reports published over the past two years, relies on interviews with sectoral actors a...

Employment conditions of immigrant day laborers in New Orleans following Hurricane Ida.

For decades El Salvador has been reliant on migration, mainly to the US, to provide remittances and an outlet for widespread underemployment. The deportation of tens of thousands of migrants annually by the United States, however, threatens to exacerbate problems of joblessness, poverty, and informality in local economies, calling into question the...

With the increase in labor market flexibility and worksite immigration enforcement, day labor is a common type of informal employment arrangement among immigrants. Our study contextualized day laborers' physical and mental health within work- and community-level factors. We use a nationally representative sample of 2015 day laborers from the Nation...

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON)—a federation of community-based worker centers and advocacy organizations—implemented a plan to respond to the twin public health and unemployment crises that were rapidly unfolding. Making use of a national network of worker centers and their local organizat...

As climate crises make post-disaster recovery work ever more essential, protecting migrant laborers from hazardous conditions and exploitation is an increasingly urgent task.

How do “ideas from elsewhere” shape local policy debates? Over the last decade or two, the policy mobilities approach from the emerging field of critical policy studies has taken up this question by problematizing conventional understandings of policymaking. Whereas traditional approaches to studying policy transfer tended to describe the prudent s...

Antipode was founded in 1969 as an intellectual and political intervention in the discipline of geography; in the wider social sciences; and in a world riven by war, racism, sexism, colonialism, and injustice. A proliferation of Marxist scholarship followed, published in the pages of Antipode and, to a much lesser extent, in other, more mainstream,...

Informally employed domestic workers encounter a range of workplace hazards, though these have been poorly documented and are typically left unacknowledged. Safety concerns include exposure to toxic cleaning products, a high prevalence of ergonomic injuries, and inadequate access to medical care. Presenting the results of an in-person survey of 2,0...

Recent research begins to explore how organizations of informal workers function, and succeed or fail. Using cases of domestic-worker movements in Mexico and the United States, we seek to extend this research by adding historical analysis of the movements’ evolution through a cross-national analysis of movement differences. We draw on concepts from...

This Research Agenda on Casual Work has been designed by a Strategic Network Team that includes researchers and policy actors from across the world. It outlines a strategy to provide a global account of the rise of casual work that also illuminates divergences and similarities in employer- and worker-strategies and state and civil society responses...

This essay examines the role of arts and culture in processes of identity formation and collective action among day laborers in the United States. Focusing on the performance of “The Ballad of Industry,” a corrido (narrative poem set to music)that was written by a day laborer following an immigration raid at an informal hiring site in southern Cali...

This study examines the context of reception for Zimbabwean migrants who are engaged in South Africa's informal economy. It seeks to contribute to two areas of migration scholarship: (a) the emergence of new immigrant destinations in the global South and (b) the role of the informal economy in shaping the context of reception for migrants in new ga...

Completed in collaboration with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network

Representative survey of day laborers in Houston to document working conditions of "second responders" following Hurricane Harvey.

A group of women in the rural Eastern Cape Province of South Africa earns a living collecting scrap metal and paying to transport it for sale in Durban. The sustainability of their livelihood is in question because of an ever-shrinking supply of recyclable metals, fluctuating commodity prices, and the logistical difficulties of transporting the mat...

Capitalist economies undergo the continual creation and destruction of jobs, leading to rising and falling levels of unemployment and producing uneven impacts across places, regions, territories, and scales. Economic geographers have advanced a distinctive approach to the study of regional labor markets and regional unemployment, one that sees labo...

South Africa's small but growing informal sector has become an increasingly important source of employment for migrants to the country's urban centres. Informal hiring sites have become a common feature of the post-apartheid city, yet the hardships associated with precarious work have received little sustained policy or programmatic intervention. T...

Day labor worker centers have emerged as an important mode of regulatory action in the informal economy of major U.S. cities. Research suggests that these organizations are beneficial in improving employment outcomes experienced by migrant workers engaged in this labor market sector. Yet, the extent to which these organizations impact the social in...

It has been widely documented that unauthorized immigrants experience adverse economic incorporation in destination countries, particularly in the global North. Faced with restricted employment opportunities, many are drawn into informalizing segments of the labour market where earnings are low and unstable. Much less is known about how immigrant w...

Day labor worker centers have emerged as an important mode of regulatory action in the informal economy of major US cities. Research suggests that these organizations are beneficial in improving employment outcomes experienced by migrant workers engaged in this labor market sector. Yet, the extent to which these organizations impact the social inte...

Using data from a representative survey of 2,004 Latinos in four urban counties in the USA, this paper considers a question that has not been systematically investigated: how has increasing police involvement in immigration enforcement impacted the perceptions of the police that are held by immigrant and non-immigrant Latinos? Survey results indica...

L’informalite economique est generalement definie comme l’absence d’action etatique a cause de deficits institutionnels dans la capacite de l’Etat a reguler les activites economiques sur son territoire. Il existe un certain consensus sur l’importance de comprendre le role de l’Etat dans la suppression ou la croissance de l’informalite, afin de mieu...

Literature and theory surrounding the informal economy in international contexts suggest that informal work arrangements may entail assuming various levels of risk, and that the higher the level of risk in an employment arrangement, the higher the premium paid to the worker. This study is designed to assess if a wage compensation for risk exists wi...

This paper provides a critical overview of major trends impacting labor standards in the global economy. On the production side, these include the increasing financialization of capital, internationalization of production networks, and informalization of employment. These processes interact with changes within labor markets resulting from a doublin...

Artykuł stanowi bezpośrednią odpowiedź na wcześniejsze głosy w debacie na temat historyczności państwa neoliberalnego. Mierząc się z propozycjami Loïca Wacquanta i Mathieu Hilgersa, autorzy uzupełniają je o lekceważony, nie tylko w tym przypadku, wymiar przestrzenności. Zabieg ten pozwala na traktowanie neoliberalizacji, odróżnionej od bardziej sta...

This collection of contributions uses the 21nd anniversary of the publication of Allan Cochrane’s Whatever Happened to Local Government? (1993) to reflect on the state of contemporary English local government, and in the process assess the book’s intellectual legacy.

This paper examines an important aspect of the politicisation of contingent work: the evolution of grassroots organising strategies by immigrant day labourers, an allegedly ‘unorganisable’ class of contingent workers. The paper focuses on the ways in which repertoires of contestation – based in a philosophy of social transformation through radical...

Purpose This paper compares conditions in informal day-labor markets in South Africa and the United States to better understand the nature of worker vulnerabilities in this market, as well as the economic conditions that have contributed to the growth of day labor. The conclusion considers interventions that are underway in the two countries to imp...

We inhabit a perpetually accelerating and increasingly interconnected world, with new ideas, fads, and fashions moving at social-media speed. New policy ideas, especially “ideas that work,” are now able to find not only a worldwide audience but also transnational salience in remarkably short order. Fast Policy is the first systematic treatment of t...

Reflections #1, “Pursuing projects, following policies,” is the first in a series of reflections that close each section of the book, where we anticipate some of the methodological and interpretative challenges of this critical approach to policy mobility. Here, in conversation with the extended case study method, we characterize our strategy for r...

The conclusion reflects on the analytical lessons have been learned across the two case studies. It suggests that there is evidence that qualitatively different forms of fast policy are at work in each of the sprawling fields of practice that are PB and CCTs, considering what this might mean for the politics of policy “translation.”

Adopts a more global perspective on CCT policy development, considering the roles played by multilateral agencies. In one sense, this is a story of the formidable power of organizations like the World Bank as “knowledge managers.” On the other hand, the limits of the Bank’s hegemonic reach are also revealed: domestic politics continue to exert a ma...

Chapter 3, “New Ideas for New York City,” explores Mayor Bloomberg’s experiment in South-North policy learning, his ultimately frustrated attempt to replicate the well-publicized successes of the Mexican Oportunidades program. New York City’s struggling CCT program is a sobering reminder of the challenges of “off-the-shelf” policy borrowing, but it...

Chapter 1 critically reviews the literatures on policy transfer, with an eye towards understanding the contributions and limits of orthodox approaches researching policy mobility. It presents a social-constructivist approach that problematizes the inherent tensions between local specificity and global interconnectedness, and the continuous processe...

This article explores strategies for organizing workers in residential construction in light of the decades long restructuring of the industry. It begins by charting the course of this restructuring and the impacts it has had on employment conditions, including changes in union density, the deterioration of labor standards, and the rise of various...

Objective The objective of this study was to assess the impact of day laborer worker centers on the hourly wages earned by day laborers. Using data from the National Day Labor Survey, a two-step method was estimated to measure the wage impacts of day labor worker centers, and to control for endogeneity and selection bias. Estimated wages were compa...

1993 saw the publication of Whatever happened to local government? In it Allan Cochrane explored the changes to local government that occurred over the late 1970s and 1980s. This period saw it at the epicenter of Thatcherism. Labelled as “bloated” by the Conservatives, local government was restructured, recast as an “enabler” or “facilitator”. Thro...

Drawing on an innovative, representative survey of workers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City, the authors analyze minimum wage, overtime, and other workplace violations in the low-wage labor market. They document significant interindustry variation in both the mix and the prevalence of violations, and they show that while differences in wo...

Neoliberalization processes have been reshaping the landscapes of urban development for more than three decades, but their forms and consequences continue to evolve through an eclectic blend of failure and crisis, regulatory experimentation, and policy transfer across places, territories and scales. The proliferation of familiar neoliberal discours...

Since the creation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, domestic workers, or workers employed in private homes as nannies, housekeepers, and personal attendants, have routinely been excluded from labor and occupational safety and health laws protecting many other workers. In addition to increasing their workplace isolation and vulnerability to exploita...

The dismantling of the Fordist social contract and the neoliberalization of labor regulation have been associated with a historic shift toward decentralized, commodified, and atomized employment relationships, vividly reflected in the rise of temping and the (re)appearance of labor corners. This essay explores how these regressive tendencies—which...

The onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been widely interpreted as a fundamental challenge to, if not crisis of, neoliberal governance. Here, we explore some of the near-term and longer-run consequences of the economic crisis for processes of neoliberalization, asking whether we have been witnessing the terminal unraveling of neolibera...

Neoliberal policies, strategies, and rationalities have been further entrenched rather than abandoned in the wake of the 2008-2009 Great Recession. Understanding this state of affairs requires careful reflection on the process of neoliberalization as a crisis-induced, crisis-inducing form of market-disciplinary regulatory restructuring. Against the...

O início da crise financeira global em 2008 foi interpretado como um desafio fundamental à governança neoliberal. O artigo explora algumas das consequências de curto e longo prazo da crise econômica em relação aos processos da neoliberalização e propõe referências teóricas para uma compreensão adequada da natureza desse modelo político e socioeconô...

The paper reflects on the methodological challenges involved in research on the movement and mutation of fast-moving policies, through globalizing networks and across translocal settings. Inspired by ‘follow the thing’ methods and by the global ethnography program, it outlines a distended case-study approach to the study of policy mobilities. <?tf=...

The paper explores the evolution of urban policy discourses among advanced industrial nations in the period since the early 1980s, by way of a case study of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). The OECD, it is argued, has provided an arena for the consolidation of a particular form of neoliberal urbanism, conceived her...

Sparked by the pioneering interventions of Stephen Gill (1995a, 1998b, 2000, 2003), the literature on the new constitutionalism has provided an illuminating basis for conceptualizing the market-disciplinary regulatory reorganization of world capitalism since the 1980s. This work represents an important contribution to the ongoing debate on neo-libe...

Against the background of debates on the origins and implications of the global economic crisis of 2008-2009, this essay presents a theoretical framework for analyzing processes of regulatory restructuring under contemporary capitalism. The analysis is framed around the concept of neoliberalization, which we view as a keyword for understanding the...

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding t...

The onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been widely interpreted as a fundamental challenge to, if not crisis of, neoliberal governance. Here, we explore some of the near-term and longer-run consequences of the economic crisis for processes of neoliberalization, asking whether we have been witnessing the terminal unraveling of neolibera...

The paper presents a genealogy of the Bloomberg administration’s Opportunity NYC program, launched in 2007 as part of New York City’s explicitly experimental anti-poverty strategy. Opportunity NYC was modeled on “conditional cash transfer” programs, currently operating in more than thirty countries across the Global South, drawing direct inspiratio...

Introducing the special issue on “Mobilizing policy,” the paper contrasts orthodox approaches to policy transfer with an emerging body of work in the interdisciplinary field critical policy studies. The governing metaphors in this latter body of work are those of mobility and mutation (rather than transfer, transit, and transaction), policymaking d...

This commentary critically engages with arguments made by Loïc Wacquant in his book Urban Outcasts on the nature of public discourse regarding concentrated urban poverty in the United States. In particular, it elaborates a critical reading of the international circulation of social-scientific analyses of urban poverty—in particular the concept of t...

In this article, we analyze the connections between neoliberalization processes and urban transformations. Cities have become strategically central sites in the uneven, crisis-laden advance of neoliberal restructuring projects. However, in contrast to neoliberal ideology, our analysis draws attention to the path-dependent interactions between neoli...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of day labor worker centers in improving wages and working conditions of migrant casual workers in the USA. Design/methodology/approach The paper reports the results of a survey of worker center executive directors and senior staff, with particular attention to the ways in which centers main...