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.

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.