Sandcastles of hope? Civil society organizations and the working conditions of migrant farmworkers in North America

This research explores whether civil society organizations (CSOs) can contribute to more effectively regulating the working conditions of temporary migrant farmworkers in North America. This dissertation unfolds in five parts. The first part of the dissertation sets out the background context. The context includes the political economy of agriculture and temporary migrant labour more broadly. It also includes the political economy of the legal regulations that govern immigration and work relations. The second part of the research builds an analytical model for studying the operation of CSOs active in working with the migrant farmworker population. The purpose of the analytical framework is to make sense of real-world examples by providing categories for analysis and a means to get at the channels of influence that CSOs utilize to achieve their aims. To this end, the model incorporates the insights from three significant bodies of literature—regulatory studies, labour studies, and economic sociology. The third part of the dissertation suggests some key strategic issues that CSOs should consider when intervening to assist migrant farmworkers, and also proposes a series of hypotheses about how CSOs can participate in the regulatory process. The fourth part probes and extends these hypotheses by empirically investigating the operation of three CSOs that are currently active in assisting migrant farm workers in North America: the Agricultural Workers Alliance (Canada), Global Workers’ Justice Alliance (USA), and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (USA). The fifth and final part draws together lessons from the empirical work and concluded that CSOs can fill gaps left by the waning power of actors, such as trade unions and labour inspectorates, as well as act in ways that these traditional actors can not.

International Capital Flows and Monetary Policy Spillovers

This dissertation examines the drivers and implications of international capital flows. The overarching motivation is the observation that countries not at the centre of global financial markets are subject to considerable spillovers from centre countries, notably from their monetary policy. I present new empirical evidence on the determinants of the observed patterns of international capital flows and monetary policy spillovers, and study their effect on both financial markets and the real economy. In Chapter 2 I provide evidence on the determinants of a puzzling negative correlation observed between productivity growth and net capital inflows to developing and emerging market economies (EMEs) since 1980. By disaggregating net capital inflows into their gross components, I show that this negative correlation is explained by capital outflows related to purchases of very liquid assets from the fastest growing countries. My results suggest a desire for international portfolio diversification in liquid assets by fast growing countries is driving much of the original puzzle. In the reminder of my dissertation I pivot to study the foreign characteristics that drive international capital flows and monetary policy spillovers, with a particular focus on the role of unconventional monetary policy in the United States (U.S.). In Chapter 3 I show that a significant portion of the heterogeneity in EMEs' asset price adjustment following the quantitative easing operations by the Federal Reserve (the Fed) during 2008-2014 can be explained by the degree of bilateral capital market frictions between these countries and the U.S. This is true even after accounting for capital controls, exchange rate regimes, and domestic monetary policies. Chapter 4, co-authored with Michal Ksawery Popiel, studies unconventional monetary policy in a small open economy, looking specifically at the case of Canada since the global financial crisis. We quantify the effect Canadian unconventional monetary policy shocks had on the real economy, while carefully controlling for and quantifying spillovers from U.S. unconventional monetary policy. Our results indicate that the Bank of Canada's unconventional monetary policy increased Canadian output significantly from 2009-2010, but that spillovers from the Fed's policy were even more important for increasing Canadian output after 2008.

A Historical Materialist Approach to the Eurozone Crisis: Fictitious Capital, States, and Capital Accumulation

This dissertation examines the ongoing European sovereign debt crises that began with Greece in 2009, in the wake of the US subprime mortgage crisis. Through the application of a historical materialist approach, I attempt to understand the on-going crisis in the European Monetary Union (EMU) by investigating root causes of sovereign debt crises, relations of power, and main beneficiaries of the policy responses. My theoretical framework hinges on three contradictions in capitalism: the tendency towards overaccumulation, the tension between fictitious capital and the productive base, and the contradiction inherent in capitalist states between their role as a national state and as a class state. In contrast to the dominant positions that locate the cause of the crisis within either: debtor states; creditor states; or the framework at the EMU, I argue that these sovereign debt crises are actually a broader crisis of crisis of capitalism within the EMU itself. In order to do so, I trace the evolution of the political economy of the Eurozone in the post-Bretton woods era, with a particularly focus on the credit system. More specifically, I argue that these crises are the result of an interaction between three meso-level contradictions that have developed within the EMU region: 1) Germany’s postwar accumulation regime, which has produced a deep crisis of overaccumulation; 2) the contradictory processes associated with the neoliberal logic of the EMU, by which I mean the rush to lower barriers to credit and finance at the expense of all else; and 3) credit-fueled, consumption-based EMU integration in the periphery; and. These three contradictions came together in the wake of the 2007-2008 US subprime crisis to form an overall crisis of capitalism in the Eurozone, expressed, as I suggest, as a crisis of fictitious capital. This dissertation aims to contribute to the ongoing project among critical political economists to de-naturalize and re-politicize money, while challenging the hegemony of monetarism within neoliberalism. Second, there has yet to be a comprehensive study that examines the EMU, Germany, and the crises in the periphery from a holistic, historical materialist analysis.