Browsing by Subject "Unions"
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Item Disobedient markets : street vendors, enforcement, and state intervention in collective action(2017-05) Hummel, Calla Marie Buzy; Madrid, Raúl L.; Auyero, Javier; Findley, Mike; Weyland, Kurt; Wolford, ScottUnder what conditions do informal workers organize? Contrary to conventional wisdom, informal workers organize in nearly every major city on every continent and officials often encourage them to do so. I demonstrate that under certain conditions, governments offer private benefits to informal workers who organize self-regulating associations, which solves the workers' collective action problem. This leads to another puzzle: why do governments pay people to organize, especially people who routinely violate the law? I argue that where the state cannot stop violators, it may prefer to pay violators to organize a self-regulating group rather than enforce the law itself. The state can then bargain over legalization, regulation, and enforcement with a representative group. The project challenges assumptions about collective action in marginalized communities and offers a new theory of collective action where informal workers interact strategically with the state. I argue that where enforcement is costly, states may take an active role in encouraging potential violators to organize and, once organized, regulate themselves. Recent work on the politics of enforcement demonstrates that governments reap political benefits by not enforcing laws against poor citizens in informal work and housing. However, foregoing enforcement can create additional political, public health, and material costs. I extend this work by using enforcement costs to explain why informal workers organize. I suggest that where governments successfully encourage potential violators to organize, governments keep the political benefits of forgoing enforcement while civil society organizations assume partial responsibility for enforcement. My fieldwork included 14 months in Bolivia and Brazil working as a street vendor, gathering 92 interviews, and administering two surveys. Chapter 1 of the project develops the puzzle---why do informal workers organize, given barriers to collective action---in the context of current research. Chapter 2 presents the theory and then formalizes it in a game theoretic model of collective action. Chapter 3 justifies the model's assumptions and demonstrates how its dynamics work in an ethnography of street vendor organizations and their interactions with the city government in La Paz, Bolivia. Chapter 4 illustrates how the model explains variation across people and places by comparing street vendors in La Paz to their counterparts in the neighboring city of El Alto. I then compare the highly organized street vendors in La Paz to the sparsely organized vendors in São Paulo, Brazil. Chapter 5 tests the theory on out-of-sample data: 26,304 self-employed respondents in 17 countries from the Latin American Public Opinion Project. I analyze the data with logistic regressions and then move to a nonparametric machine learning framework to address concerns about identifying assumptions. I find similar patterns in different types of data across different analytic frameworks, lending support to the theory.Item Miners and musicians : rethinking company towns through the Butte Mines Band, 1887-1953(2020-12-10) Lockman, Gwendolyn Reid; Bsumek, Erika MarieThis masters’ report argues that the role of the Butte Mines Band in its community, from funerals to celebrations of life for miners and their families, shows how life in Butte, Montana outside of mining was mediated by copper mining interests, but that the city was not a company town. This is primarily evident from financial support of the Band by Butte’s copper companies, but it is also part of a more complex story of corporate influence, unionism, and environment. Using a socio-environmental lens to look at how environment and human interaction work in concert to create social and cultural structures, norms, and behaviors, this study reconsiders the meaning of the phrase “company town,” and considers a scope of “studyscapes” to analyze sensory knowledge of Butte. These include landscape, workscape, soundscape, playscape, and deathscape. The Mines Band offers a confluence of these culturescapes that reveals a complicated web of influence on local culture. This report primarily uses archival research from the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives in Butte, Montana. It builds on the historiography of mining, labor, recreation, unionism, and environment in the U.S. West. It also uses interdisciplinary methods by borrowing from ethnographic social sciences to consider walking as valuable historical method for place-based study. This is done in concert with studying sensory history. While historical sound and smell cannot be determined by present qualitative evaluations, the historian can revisit place to better consider the context for how sensory consumption may have changed over time. Chapter One details the extant scholarship on Butte and introduces readers to the theoretical frameworks for studying the Mines Band in a socio-environmental context. It outlines the problems with considering Butte a company town while offering a means to understand the complex corporate-cultural relationship in the city. Chapter Two focuses on Butte’s urban development and cultural makeup, outlining the several sensory landscapes of life in Butte, including soundscape, smellscape, playscape, and deathscape. Chapter Three details homes in on the Butte Mines Band and examines its role in the city, connecting place, mining, and death to cultural customs.