I hope you'll find this article useful. Eva ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Mon, 02 Feb 1998 11:57:03 -0800 (PST) From: Ken Boettcher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Workers & Silicon Valley's 'Boom' To: Recipients of The_People List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Status: O THE PEOPLE FEBRUARY 1998 Vol. 107 No. 11 SILICON VALLEY "BOOM" NO BOON TO WORKERS BY NATHAN KARP At various times during recent months, economists, politicians and others have pointed to Silicon Valley in California as a model of the nation's "expanding economy." For example, in its Dec. 31 issue, the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS declared that "American consumers' confidence in the future surged this month to the highest level in nearly three decades, propelled in large part by optimism on the West Coast, where many residents have seen an economic boom that shows few signs of ending." A recent report, however, painted a picture of Silicon Valley's "booming" economy that was anything but a confidence booster. The report bears the title "Growing Together or Drifting Apart" and reportedly was prepared and issued by something called Working Partnerships USA, identified as an "offshoot" of California's South Bay AFL-CIO Central Labor Council and the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank based in Washington, D.C. The report charged that a "small elite" had reaped "the benefits of Silicon Valley's economic boom," while "working- class families" were struggling to get by on "stagnant wages." And though it agreed with the general contention that Silicon Valley was "setting the pace in America's...information-based economy," it noted that hundreds of thousands of what it designated "our neighbors" were "at risk of being left behind." (SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS, Jan. 13.) In a forward to the report, Amy Dean, executive officer of the labor council, wrote: "At a time when Silicon Valley business and the community should be growing together, our research finds that in far too many respects we are drifting apart." As an example, the report noted that in 1991 the salaries of the highest paid Silicon Valley executives were on average 42 times the wages of a "typical line worker," but that ratio had grown to 220 to 1 by 1996. The report also concluded, after analyzing annual Census Bureau surveys, that the hourly wages of up to three-quarters of the workers in Silicon Valley had actually shrunk between 1990 and 1996. "Workers may be making more money, the report says, but only by 'working more hours for less money.'" Even the limited details available of the contents of the AFL- CIO-sponsored report indicates that the report scores heavily against the repeated claims that workers generally are sharing in the fruits of the alleged booming economy. But a more important fact is that the report quite obviously contains nothing that would enlighten workers as a class as to the true nature of the society under which they are brutally exploited, "good times" or bad, of the bulk of the wealth they produce. The complaint that "business" and the "community" are "drifting apart" rather than "coming together" provides an incisive look into the labor leaders' fatuous concept that under this capitalist system there is some basic economic interest between the workers (embodied in the more euphonious term "community") and their capitalist exploiters (referred to by the rather meaningless term "business") that should serve to bring them together and result in both enjoying some "fair" share of society's largess. Moreover, we venture to suggest that the report probably does not contain a word about the inability, hence the failure, of the existing AFL-CIO unions to serve as a positive and effective weapon in workers' efforts to resist the capitalists' effort to impose ever-increasing rates of exploitation! Not a word about the fact that the swollen salaries of corporate executives represent only a portion of the wealth that the workers produce and which is appropriated by the capitalist class as surplus value. Not a word about the fact that in its essential economic and material premises, and in the class relationships it engenders, what the AFL-CIO report calls "America's new information-based economy" remains what it was-- capitalism--a system of private ownership of the socially necessary means of production and distribution and production for profit. Not a word that the AFL-CIO has consistently upheld, and continues to uphold, that system as one that serves the interests of its worker-members, even as it bemoans the concrete evidence that it doesn't. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
