| Why are nonprofit organizations developing new governance approaches to address the labor exploitation faced by workers in the informal economy? And, what effects are nonprofits able to produce for informal workers? These are the two main questions examined in this dissertation in a comparative case study of nonprofit-driven "governance of informal economy conflicts" (GIEC) in three cities in the United States and Mexico (Baltimore, Denver, and Guadalajara). Based on data from 227 open-ended interviews with nonprofit organizations, informal workers, governmental agencies, and labor unions, the study finds that the emergence of nonprofit organizations concerned with the labor conditions of informal workers is primarily the result of new sets of ideas taking hold in local civil societies. Specifically, these organizations operate from anti-globalization frames, especially frames positing a connection between worker powerlessness and the displacement of Third World peoples through the spread of free trade regimes. The debate on globalization is variable across cities, however, so that the appearance of organizations that come to view informal work as a policy problem is uneven; organizations working from other frames tend not to garner the same kind of sympathy for informal workers that leads those organizations operating from the frame to commit resources and create new mechanisms to ameliorate abusive labor conditions. Moreover, the primary effect of this frame is the creation of an exclusionary system of GIEC, targeted only to those populations that nonprofits connect to these global processes. In the US cities, this has taken on an ethnic dimension whereby GIEC---as a means of extending labor protections to marginalized workers---is centered on Latino immigrants working informally to the exclusion of American-born informal workers with equivalent labor market experiences. The dissertation concludes that, normatively, such an exclusionary system of labor recourse falls short of securing economic justice. |
