UP AGAINST THE OPEN SHOP -
The Hidden Story of Silicon Valley's High-Tech Workers
By David Bacon
New Labor Forum -- winter 2011
truthout, 3/4/11
http://www.truth-out.org/up-against-open-shop-hidden-story-silicon-valleys-high-tech-workers68167
Introduction
On January 29, 1993 workers at the
Versatronex plant in Sunny¬vale, California,
filed out of its doors for the last time.
Seventeen years have passed since, but there are
still electronics workers in Sili¬con Valley who
remember the company's name. It was the first
valley plant struck by production employees, and
the first where a strike won recognition of their
union.
The struggle of these workers, almost all
immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the
Philippines, demolished some of the most
cherished myths about the Silicon Valley
workforce. It showed workers there are like
workers everywhere. Under the right
circumstances, even in the citadel of high tech's
open shop, people are willing to organize for a
better life. "We said at the beginning that if
the company was going to close, let them close,"
said Sandra Gomez, a leader of the Ver¬satronex
strike. "But as long as the plant was open, we
were going to fight for our rights."
Unions have called the electronics
industry "unorganizable." Corpora¬tions like
IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and National
Semiconductor told their workers for years that
the company regarded them as a family, and that
they needed no union. Healthy bottom lines, they
said, would guarantee rising living standards and
secure jobs. Economists painted a picture of the
electronics industry as a massive industrial
engine fueling economic growth, benefiting
workers and communities alike.
The promises were worthless. Today many
those giants of the industry own no factories at
all, having sold them to contract manufacturers
who build computers and make chips in locations
from China to Hungary. In the factories that
remain in the valley, labor contractors like
Manpower have become the formal employers,
relieving the big brands of any responsibility
for the workers who make the products bearing
their labels.
While living standards rise for a
privileged elite at the top of the workforce,
they've dropped for thousands of workers on the
production line. Tens of thousands of workers
have been dropped off the lines entirely, as
production was moved out of the valley to other
states and countries. Companies long ago
eliminated their no-layoff pledge. Permanent
jobs became temporary, and then disappeared
entirely. The image of the clean industry was
undermined by toxic contamination of the valley's
water supply, and a high occurrence of chemically
induced industrial illness.
Despite these obstacles, however, for
three decades Silicon Valley was as much a
cauldron of new strategies for labor organizing
as it was for corporate management of the
workforce. Workers developed important tactics
to oppose inhuman conditions. Some unions, like
the janitors, wielded those tactics with
remarkable success. For production workers in
the plants themselves, however, the road was
harder, and often seemed to accept the industry's
mythology that they either couldn't or wouldn't
organize.
The Development of the High Tech Workforce
One of the oldest myths about Silicon
Valley is that its high tech innovations were the
brainchildren of a few, brilliant white men, who
started giant corporations in their garages. In
fact, the basic inventions that form the
foundation of the electronics industry,
especially the solid-state transistor, were
developed at Bell Laboratories, American
Telephone and Telegraph, Fairchild Camera and
Instrument, and General Electric. These
innovations were products of the Cold War - of
the race in arms and space that began after World
War Two. Long before the appearance of the
per¬sonal computer, high tech industry grew fat
on defense contracts and rising military budgets.
Its Cold War roots affected every aspect of the
industry, from its attitude towards unions to the
structure of its plants and workforce.
As the electronics indus¬try began to
grow in the 1950's, a fratricidal struggle within
the U.S. labor move¬ment led to the expulsion of
many unions and union members for their leftwing
politics. One byproduct of that struggle was the
near-destruction of the union founded to organize
workers in the electrical industry - the United
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
(UE). General Elec¬tric Corp. in particular
helped ensure the fragmentation of the electrical
industry workforce among 13 different unions,
with a great proportion outside any union at all.
As a result, while the new high-tech industry was
growing, the ability of electrical and
electronics workers to organize unions in the
expanding plants fell to its lowest point since
the early 1930s.
From the beginning, high tech workers had
to face an industry-wide anti-union policy.
Robert Noyce, who participated in the invention
of the transis¬tor and later became a co-founder
of Intel Corp., declared that "remaining
non-union is an essential for survival for most
of our companies. If we had the work rules that
unionized companies have, we'd all go out of
business. This is a very high priority for
management here. We have to retain flexibility
in operating our companies. The great hope for
our nation is to avoid those deep, deep divisions
be¬tween workers and management which can
paralyze action."
The expanding electronics plants were
laboratories for developing personnel-man¬agement
techniques for maintaining "a union-free
environment." Some of those techniques pioneered
in Silicon Valley, like the team-concept method
for controlling workers on the plant floor, were
later used to weaken unions in other industries,
from auto manufacturing to steelmaking.
Another co-inventor of the transistor,
William Shockley, won renown as a partisan of
theories of the racial inferiority of
African-Americans. As Shockley, Noyce and others
guided the development of the industry in Silicon
Valley, they in¬stituted policies that
effectively segregated its workforce. In
electron¬ics plants women were the overwhelm¬ing
majority, while the engineering and management
staff consisted overwhelmingly of men.
Immigrants from Asian and Latin American
countries were drawn to the valley's production
lines. Engineering and management jobs went to
white employees.
By the mid-1990s Asian workers made up
30% of the skilled production workforce, 47% of
the semiskilled workforce, and 41% of the
unskilled workforce. Latinos consti¬tuted 18% of
skilled workers, 21% of semiskilled workers, and
36% of unskilled workers. Both groups together
were only 17% of management employees, and 25% of
professional and engineering employees. The same
picture held true for women. While 23% of
management employees were women, and 29% of
professionals, women were 80% of clerical
employees, 40% of skilled workers, 60% of
semiskilled workers, and 50% of unskilled
workers. The picture painted by these statistics
is still largely accurate today.
African-American workers were frozen out
almost entirely. Although unemployment in the
African-American communities of Oakland and East
Palo Alto, within easy commuting distance of the
plants, has remained at depression levels,
African-Americans are not above 7.5% of the
workforce in any category, and below 3% in
management and engineering.
Karen Hossfeld, a sociologist at San
Francisco State University who has writ¬ten
extensively on the status of women in high tech
industry, explains the segrega¬tion as a
conscious decision on the part of manufacturers.
"Employers assume for¬eign-born women will be
unlikely to agitate for pay hikes," she says.
The First Effort - Organizing Semiconductor Workers
The historic base for organizing activity
among high tech workers for many years was the
workforce in the semiconductor plants. Starting
in the early 1970s, workers began to form
organizing committees affiliated to the UE in
plants belonging to National Semiconductor,
Siltec, Fairchild, Siliconix, Semimetals, and
others. Most of these were semiconductor
manufacturing plants, or factories that supplied
raw materials to those plants.
Amy Newell helped start a rank-and-file
organizing committee at the Siliconix plant in
the early 1970s. Two decades later she became
the UE's national secretary-treasurer, the
highest-ranking woman union officer in the U.S.
at the time. After leaving the UE, for many years
she headed the AFL-CIO's Central Labor Council in
Monterey County, just south of Silicon Valley.
She recalls that "although I got my job at
Siliconix by chance, we concentrated on the
larger plants because the level of capital
investment by the companies was so large there.
They were the big players, and we wanted to go
for the heart. Neverthe¬less, it was very hard
organizing a union in those plants, because the
feeling of pow¬erlessness among the workers was
so difficult to overcome."
To organize unions in the large
electronics manufacturing plants, Newell says "it
seems ob¬vious that there has to be a long term
effort and commitment, with an industry-wide
approach. It's hard to imagine organizing any of
the plants without a much larger movement among
workers in the industry as a whole, and in the
communi¬ties in which the workers live."
By the early 1980's, the UE Electronics
Organizing Committee had grown to involve a
signed-up core membership of over 500 workers,
who were participants in a number of union
campaigns.
Romie Manan was an active member of the
committee through the early 1980s, organizing
Filipino immigrant workers on the production
lines at Na¬tional Semiconductor. Manan
remembers that the union published 5000 copies a
month of a newsletter, The Union Voice, in three
languages - English, Spanish and Tagalog.
Workers handed it out in front of their own
plants, or in front of other plants if they were
afraid to make their union sympa¬thies known to
their coworkers. "A few of us were aboveground,
to give workers the idea that the union was an
open and legitimate organization, but most
workers were not publicly identified with the
union," he recalls.
The union depended on the activism of
workers in the plants themselves. For a number
of years there was no union staff person assigned
to Silicon Valley, and at the height of its
activity, a single union organizer, Michael
Eisenscher, was the committee's link to the
national union, running the union mimeograph
machine in his garage. The strategy of the UE
Electronics Organizing Committee envisioned a
pro¬longed struggle to win the loyalty and
commitment of a majority of workers in the
semiconductor plants. Committee members
challenged the companies on basic questions of
wages, working conditions, discrimination and job
security. It won cost-of-living raises, held
public hearings on racism and firings in the
plants, and campaigned to expose the dangers of
working with numerous toxic chemicals.
Eventually the semiconductor
manufacturers, especially National
Semicon¬ductor, fired many of the leading union
activists, and the committee gradually dis¬persed
as its members sought work wherever they could
find it. The main strategic question, which the
committee sought to answer, remains unresolved.
In large electronics manufacturing plants,
employing thousands of workers, the process of
organization doesn't take place overnight. For a
long period of time union-minded workers,
especially worker-organizers, are a minority.
Their organization has to be active on the plant
floor, winning over the majority of workers by
fighting around the basic conditions that affect
them. In the process, it has to be able to help
its members survive in an ex¬treme anti-union
climate.
This long-term perspective is very
different from the organizing style of most
unions today. Many view union organizing as a
process of win¬ning union representation
elections administered by the National Labor
Relations Board. Others try to use outside
leverage to force management to remain neutral
while workers sign union cards, and eventually
negotiate a contract. While both strategies have
something to offer electronics workers,
especially over the long haul, they don't deal
directly with the situation that exists on the
plant floor. The prospects of successfully
fighting a union election cam¬paign inside a
semiconductor or computer-building plant are
extremely remote. The huge corporations have
insulated themselves from their production
workforce so well that outside pressure has
little effect on them. In reality, most unions
have simply abandoned the idea of helping workers
in those plants to organize at all, saying that
they are "unorganizable."
Toxic Contamination and Runaway Jobs
Despite its lack of success in organizing
permanent unions in the plants and winning
bargaining rights, the UE Electronics Organizing
Committee was a nexus of activity from which
other organizations developed.
The Santa Clara Committee on Occupational
Safety and Health (SCCOSH), originally founded by
health and safety activists in the late 1970s,
included members of the UE committee who left the
plants to work on its staff. It built broad ties
with other unions, occupational health and safety
experts, and community ac¬tivists. It fought
successfully for the elimination of such
carcinogenic chemicals as trichloroethylene, and
for the right of electronics workers to know the
hazards of toxics in the workplace. SCCOSH
sponsored the formation of the Injured Workers
Group, which organized workers suffering from
chemically induced industrial ill¬ness.
Under pressure from SCCOSH and other
health and safety groups, the Semi¬conductor
Industry Association sponsored a study of 11
plants in 1992, to disprove any connection
between the high miscarriage rate among women in
the industry, and their job conditions. The SIA
study, however, proved exactly the opposite. It
found a direct connection between the use of
ethylene glycols and high miscarriage rates.
SCCOSH then began a Campaign to End the
Miscarriage of Justice, to force an end to the
use of these chemicals.
"When we talk about organizing,"
explained Flora Chu, then the director of
SCCOSH's Asian Workers' Program, "we have to talk
in a new way. Many immigrants, for in¬stance,
aren't used to organizing in groups at work.
SCCOSH helps to introduce them to the concept of
acting collectively, instead of as individuals,
when they want to confront their employer on
issues relating to chemical use. The
organization of unions in the plants will benefit
from this, and help workers, if unions are
sensitive to the needs and culture of immigrants."
The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition also
grew out of the health and safety campaigns that
ripped apart the image of the "clean industry."
The Toxics Coali¬tion won national recognition
when it exposed the large-scale contamination of
the water table throughout Silicon Valley by
electronics manufacturers. Coalition ac¬tivists
organized the communities surrounding the plants,
and forced the Envi¬ronmental Protection Agency
to add a number of sites to the Superfund cleanup
list.
Communities elsewhere in the country
became aware that jobs brought by the
construction of new electronics plants came at a
potentially high cost. In many areas
environmental standards and requirements were
increased as a result. The Toxics Coalition also
worked with the local labor movement and city
governments to force manufacturers to list the
chemicals used in the factories, and develop
plans for handling the possible release of toxic
chemicals in fires or other disasters.
The UE committee's last campaign in 1982
foretold much of the future for semiconductor
workers. The committee tried to mobilize
opposition to the industry's policy of moving
production out of Silicon Valley. In 1983 the
plants employed 102,200 workers; they employed
only 73,700 work¬ers ten years later. While the
number of engineers and managers increased
slightly, job losses fell much more heavily on
operators and technicians. "What this re¬ally
meant," said Romie Manan, "was that Filipino
workers in particular lost their jobs by the
thousands, more than any other national group."
Manan lost his job as National closed its last
mass production wafer fabrication line in the
valley in 1994.
Rapidly evolving technology in
electronics production has a big effect on the
lifespan of semiconductor plants. A wafer
fabrication line, the basic unit of the
production process, has a useful life of about 10
years. Then it can no longer compete with newer,
more automated lines which process larger wafers.
When technol¬ogy evolves so rapidly,
semiconductor companies must build new plants and
new fabs constantly. For workers whose jobs are
dependent on the production line, the location of
these new plants and lines is a life-and-death
ques¬tion.
Howard High, a public relations
spokesperson at Intel Corp., stated flatly that
"I really don't think we'll see more
semiconductor manufac¬turing in Silicon Valley in
the future." In 1993 Intel built a new $1
billion plant in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, instead
of California. High said that the company
decided to locate it outside Silicon Valley
because New Mexico offered Intel an industrial
revenue bond worth $1 billion, to help finance
the plant's con¬struction. California put in a
bid as well, but couldn't match the subsidies
offered by New Mexico.
Manan and other semiconductor workers
believed that lower wages were another
de¬termining factor. "The truth of the matter is
the company can hire workers in New Mexico much
more cheaply because wages there are much lower,"
he said. "New workers also earn a starting wage,
around $6-7/hour, unlike those of us with many
years in the plants here, who earned more as a
consequence. That's why National and other
companies wouldn't allow Silicon Valley workers
to transfer to the other plants."
Whether the main factor was wages or
industrial revenue bonds, large electron¬ics
companies were able to initiate bidding wars, in
which communities around the country competed to
win new production facilities by guaranteeing a
combination of cost savings, relaxation of
regulations, and direct tax subsidies. In
Silicon Valley, that competition created a
two-tier workforce. The more per¬manent jobs in
the large manufacturing plants began
disappearing. But contractors who provided
services to the large companies, from janitorial
and foodservices to the assembly of circuit
boards, employed more workers every year.
The New Wave - Organizing the Contractors
Conditions for janitors and contract
assemblers are a far cry from those associ¬ated
in the public mind with high tech manufacturing.
Workers losing jobs on wafer fabrication lines in
the semiconductor plants made as much as
$11-14/hour for operators, and more for
technicians, even in the early 1990s when the
minimum wage hovered just above $4/hour.
Companies provided medical insurance, sick leave,
vacations and other benefits. By contrast,
contract assemblers and non-union janitors are
paid close to the minimum wage, have no medical
insurance, and often no benefits at all.
In effect, workers in the service and
sweatshop sector fought to win wages and benefits
close to the level of those achieved by
semiconductor workers at the time of the previous
peak in organizing activity ten years before.
Over that period of time, the workforce of
Silicon Valley had taken a giant step backward.
The decline in living standards made the service
and sweatshop economy in Silicon Valley the
subsequent focus for workers' organizing activity.
The spark that set off this second wave
was the campaign to organize the jani¬tors at
Shine Maintenance Co., a contractor hired by
Apple Computer Corp. to clean its huge Silicon
Valley headquarters. Over 130 janitors joined
Service Employees International Union Local 1877
during an organizing drive at Shine in the fall
of 1990. When Shine became aware that its
workers had organized, it suddenly told them they
had to present verification of their legal
residence in order to keep their jobs. The
company cited the requirement, under the
em¬ployer sanctions provision of the Immigration
Reform and Control Act, that it maintain written
proof of employees' legal sta¬tus. When almost
none of Shine's workers could present the
required documents, they were terminated. The
com¬pany never questioned the documentation
provided by workers when they were hired, or at
any other time until the union drive began.
Shine's actions ignited a yearlong
campaign, which culminated in the signing of a
contract for Apple janitors in 1992. After the
firings, the union called a meeting of activists
in San Jose's large Latino community, along with
church and political figures. "We told them that
we had taken our struggle as far as we could -
that the labor movement is limited because the
law hurts workers who want to organize more than
it helps them," explained Mike Garcia, president
of Lo¬cal 1877. "So a community coalition went
to picket when our union couldn't, sup¬ported the
workers with a hunger strike, and started a
boycott of Apple prod¬ucts." That community
effort grew into the Cleaning Up Silicon Valley
Coalition.
According to Garcia, understanding the
position of immigrant workers was an important
part of the successful campaign at Shine and
Apple. "Apple spends a lot of money on its
image," he explained, "and our strategy attacked
it. We helped people to understand that the
company was exploiting immigrant janitors, and we
forced Apple to take responsibility - we told
Apple 'it's your system - you control the
contractors; you're causing the exploitation."
Other employers in the valley closely watched the
campaign at Shine and Apple. Using the same
strategy, the union went on to win a contract for
janitors at Hewlett-Packard Corp., an even larger
group than those at Apple. The momentum created
in those campaigns convinced other non-union
janitorial contractors to actively seek
agreements with Local 1877, and over 1500 new
members streamed into the union.
In September of 1992, janitors were
joined by electronics assembly workers at
Versatronex Corp., who used a similar strategy to
organize against the sweatshop conditions
prevalent in contract assembly factories. The
starting wage at the plant was $4.25 - the
minimum wage at the time - and employees with
over 15 years earned as little as $7.25. There
was no medical insurance.
Sergio Mendoza worked in the "coil room,"
making electrical coils for IBM computers for
seven years. The work process involved dipping
the coils into chem¬ical baths, and drying them
off in ovens. "They never told us the names or
the dan¬gers of the chemicals we worked with," he
recalled. "Sometimes the vapors were so strong
that our noses would begin to bleed." The
conditions in the "coil room" were very different
from those at the facilities IBM' had at the time
in South San Jose, which it referred to as a
"campus." IBM's orders gave a big boost to
Versatronex' contract assembly business for 20
years, and workers recalled seeing IBM inspectors
frequently visiting their plant.
Contract assembly provides a number of
benefits for large manufacturers like IBM.
Contractors compete to win orders by cutting
their prices, and workers' wages, to the lowest
level possible. Manufacturers can place new
orders on a moment's notice when production
demands increase, without having to hire any
workers themselves. When production needs
decrease, they can simply cut orders. If workers
lose their jobs, the manufacturer has no
responsibility for them.
Today the contract assembly system, then
in its infancy, has come to dominate high tech
industry. Corporations like Hewlett-Packard and
Apple have no factories at all. Their entire
production is carried out by contract
manufacturers in plants around the world.
Workers at Versatronex called in the UE
after they had already organized themselves to
protest conditions, and as they were preparing to
stop work to demand changes. When the company
heard rumors of the stoppage, managers held a
meeting to head off the planned action. One
worker, Joselito Muñoz, stood up and declared to
company supervi¬sors that "se acabo el tiempo de
la esclavitud," which means "the time of slavery
is over." Muñoz was fired two days later, and on
October 16 Versatronex workers went on strike to
win his job back.
In the course of their strike, workers
focused on a large customer whose boards were
assembled at Versatronex - Digital Microwave
Corp. The year before the strike DMC closed its
own manufacturing facility in Scotland. Its
orders became a main source of work for the
Versatronex plant. At the high point of the
6-week Versatronex strike, 10 women went on a
hunger strike outside DMC's gleaming office
building. For four days they fasted to dramatize
their ef¬fort to hold the manufacturer
responsible for their working con¬di¬tions. Male
strikers supported them by setting up tents and
living around the clock on the sidewalk outside
the corporate headquarters. Word of their action
spread like a shockwave through the valley's
immigrant Mexican community.
"We went on a hunger strike against
Digital Microwave Corporation because they send
work to Versatronex, and then close their eyes to
the conditions we work in," explained hunger
striker Margarita Aguilera. Aguilera was a
student activist in Mexico, and used her
experience in student strikes to come up with
tactics for organizing workers at Versatronex.
One was the hunger strike. "It is not uncommon
for Mexican workers to fast and set up 'plantons'
- tent encampments where workers live for the
strike's duration," said Maria Pan¬toja, a UE
organizer from Mexico City. "Even striking over
the firing of another worker is a reflection of
our culture of mu¬tual support, which workers
bring with them to this country. Our culture is
a source of strength for our union."
As workers at Versatronex were striking
for their union, Korean immigrants at another
contract assembly factory, USM Inc., launched a
similar struggle for justice. Their employer
closed their factory owing them two weeks pay, a
common event in the lives of contract laborers.
USM workers turned to the Korean Resource Center,
a service agency in Silicon Valley's Korean
community. Through the winter and the following
spring, they organized a series of demonstrations
in downtown San Jose against Silicon Valley Bank,
which took over the assets of the closed factory
and refused to pay the workers. According to
Bumshik Eom, a KRC staff member, "the bank said
the workers had no power,"
In the course of the conflict USM workers
formed an organiza¬tion to provide services, job
referrals and education programs to Korean
immi¬grants. "Although some workers wanted to
form a union, others brought a belief from Korea
that unions are communist," Eom said. "But
workers could agree on forming an organization to
help each other, and to educate each other on
their rights."
Despite differences in union experience
among different immigrant national¬ities, almost
all immigrant workers are on the bottom in terms
of wages, working conditions, and quality of
life. The Versatronex strike and movements among
other South Bay workers were upheavals from
below, according to Pantoja. "They shone a light
on conditions that are like apartheid for
immi¬grant sweatshop workers."
Silicon Valley organizers all emphasize
that immigrants have a harder time challenging
employers because they are often unaware of their
rights as workers. In addition, employer
sanctions and the threat of deportation make the
risk of losing a job much higher than for
non-immigrants. That vulnerability to the
employer, and the weakness of legal protections,
was cited by SEIU's Justice for Janitors as a
reason for not relying on National Labor
Relations Board elections. To overcome the
obstacle the union mobilized community pressure
through marches, demonstrations, sit-ins and
other mass ac¬tions. In that context, the
militant history of many immigrants became a
positive advantage, according to Eliseo Medina,
SEIU Executive Vice-President. "Immigrants from
Central America," he said, "have a much more
militant history as unionists than we do, and the
more militant work¬ers are, the more the union
can do."
New Obstacles and New Tactics
Many unions have lost faith in the
ability of workers to use the legal process for
winning union representation, especially the NLRB
election process. One worker out of every ten
involved in a union organizing drive gets fired
as a result, according to the AFL-CIO. Employers
can shift production, spend hun¬dreds of
thousands of dollars on expert anti-union
consultants, and use the fear of job loss to
exert enormous pressure on workers. Although
often technically illegal, these hardball tactics
go effectively unpunished by the NLRB's legal
process.
Tactics like those used at Apple, USM and
Versatronex have been at the cutting edge of the
labor movement's search for new ways to organize.
They rely strongly on close al¬liances between
workers, unions and communities to offset the
power exercised by employers. Often, though not
always, they use organizing tactics based on
direct action by workers and supporters, like
civil disobedience, rather than on a lengthy
propaganda war during a high-pressure election
campaign, which companies frequently win.
Grassroots tactics responded well to the
basic issues of low wages and bad conditions
prevalent in contract and sweatshop employment,
and contributed to giving the Silicon Valley
campaigns the character of a social movement. As
workers organize around conditions they face on
the job, they learn organizing methods they can
use to deal with issues of immigration,
discrimination in the schools, police misconduct,
and other aspects of daily life in immigrant
communities.
The movement among contract employees
took an important step when janitors united with
workers from Versatronex and USM in a march
through downtown San Jose, demanding an end to
exploitive condi¬tions for immigrants. Workers,
unions and community organizations rec¬ognized
that they were better off challenging high tech
in¬dustry together than as single organizations.
That point was brought home when
Versatronex closed its plant in Jan¬uary, 1993.
Workers had ended their strike the previous
November, and filed a petition for a
representa¬tion election in December. "When the
company knew they would lose the election, they
decided to close," Pantoja said. "In an industry
as anti-union as electronics, I assume that the
manufacturers told Versatronex that the company
would no longer get any orders if workers
successfully organized a union in the plant."
Electronics manufacturers have been
forced over the years to permit outside contract
services, like janitorial services and in-plant
construction, to be performed by union
contractors. Nevertheless, the industry has
drawn a line be¬tween outside services, and the
assembly contractors who are part of the
industry's basic production process. In one
section, unions could be grudgingly recognized;
in the other, they could not.
Workers, communities and unions need a
higher level of unity to challenge high tech
industry successfully, and to win the right for
workers to organize effec¬tively in the plants.
Combined organizing efforts, in which unions seek
to organize many contractors at the same time,
would limit the ability of employers to cut off a
single contractor like Versatronex.
A step towards this kind of unity was
taken when unions and community organi¬zations
came together in 1993 to protest plans by high
tech industry to impose its own blueprint for
economic development on the future of Silicon
Valley. The industry effort, called Joint
Venture: Silicon Valley, brought together a
coalition of over 100 industry executives and
representatives of local government bodies.
Together, they projected initiatives to shape
public policy on subjects like regula¬tory
relaxation, education, and resources for
technological development.
A labor/community coalition was formed to
respond to Joint Venture's agenda. It drew up a
Silicon Valley Pledge, calling on companies to
respect the rights of work¬ers and communities,
and to deal with them as equals. Ernestina
Garcia, a longtime Chicano com¬munity activist in
San Jose, explained that "we've never felt that
the electronics industry had the interests of our
communities at heart. If they plan the future of
the valley, they're going to do it for their
benefit, not ours."
"What we have here are different
interests," said Jorge Gonzalez, who chaired the
Cleaning Up Silicon Valley Coalition. "Economic
development in Silicon Valley has historically
served the interests of the few. We want
devel¬opment that serves the interests of the
many. Just protecting the competitiveness and
profitability of big electronics companies will
not necessarily protect our jobs and communities,
a safe environment, our right to form unions, or
our schools and public services. We don't want
anyone telling us that higher profits for big
electron¬ics companies will give us jobs, and
that we should be happy with that."
After their experiences at Apple,
Versatronex and other valley factories, unions
also tried to organize a much broader, more
comprehensive campaign, called the Campaign for
Justice. Initiated by the janitors' union,
instead of concentrating on a single contractor,
or organizing plant-by-plant, it aimed at the
whole low-wage contract workforce. While
employers could close a single plant in response
to organizing activity, organizers argued,
closing many plants would be much more difficult.
John Barton, the campaign's coordinator,
declared, "We're going to hold manufacturers
responsible for their contractors."
Rather than competing against each other,
drawing jurisdictional lines in the sand among
the valley's unorganized workers, the Campaign
for Justice was based on union cooperation. Four
separate interna¬tional unions, including the
janitors' union, the Teamsters, the hotel and
restaurant workers, and the clothing workers,
formed an overall strategy committee and
contributed re¬searchers and organizers to a
common pool. Two community representatives also
sat on the strategy committee.
Ultimately, however, the pressure for
immediate results led unions other than the
janitors to pull out. Local 1877 pushed forward
with a drive aimed at the landscape gardeners in
the valley's industrial parks. The campaign won
the support of many workers, some of whom were
fired in the process. Workers marched through
the streets and brought community pressure to
bear on contractors and their corporate clients.
Eventually, however, the campaign was folded into
the effort to renew union contracts for the
valley's janitors.
When the anti-immigrant Proposition 187
made the 1994 ballot, janitors joined other
immigrant-based unions and immigrant community
organizations in the statewide effort to defeat
it. Those efforts led to long-term relationships
between unions and immigrant communities. At the
initiative of the janitors, SEIU called for
repeal of employer sanctions, as did the garment
unions and the state labor federation. Six years
later, that coalition led a successful effort to
get the AFL-CIO nationally to call for the repeal
of sanctions, a key step in reordering labor's
relationship with immigrant workers.
For a number of years afterwards the
South Bay Labor Council of the AFL-CIO mounted an
effort to run a temporary employment agency for
high tech workers. This effort gave the labor
movement a presence among some workers, but it
concentrated on high-skilled employees rather
than production workers on the lines. Unions had
no presence in the plants themselves, and didn't
seek to mount factory-floor campaigns for
improvements in conditions.
Electronics Companies Press for Political Changes
After President Clinton was elected in
1992, high technology companies began using their
support for his campaign to press for changes in
labor law to, bring it into line with what they
called new realities. Unions and workers also
wanted changes, including enforcement of
exist¬ing rights, and new legislation to take
into account the proliferation of contract and
temporary work.
The Clinton administration set up a
commission to review labor law reform, the
Commission on the Future of Labor-Management
Relations, called the Dunlop commission for its
chairman, John Dunlop, labor secre¬tary under
President Nixon. But its mandate, rather than
reinforcing workers' union rights, was "to make
recommendations concerning what changes, if any,
are needed to improve productivity through
increased worker-management cooperation and
employee participation." The Dunlop
commission's key hearing in Silicon Valley was
convened by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley at the
request of Marty Manley, the Department of
Labor's Deputy Secretary for the American
Workplace.
Silicon Valley firms had the ear of the
Clinton administration. The president and
vice-president made numerous high-profile visits
to company facilities, valley executives were
prominent in Clinton's 1992 election campaign,
and the chair of the Joint Council of Economic
Advisors was Laura d'Andrea Tyson, a UC Berkeley
professor with strong ties to the industry.
Bill Usery, labor secretary under
Presi¬dent Ford, noted that in other parts of the
country most corporations declared that little
reform of labor law was needed. By implication,
labor law and the administration of the NLRB had
become so ineffective that companies believed it
was no longer a significant restraint on their
union-fighting activities.
But corporate executives in Silicon
Valley were not content with inac¬tion. Their
program not only called for extensive changes,
but involved a whole new philosophy and public
policy for labor/management rela¬tions. Under
the klieg lights in San Jose's cavernous
convention center, witnesses gave the commission
a good first-hand look at the "high performance
workplace" - at work teams, labor/management
cooperation, the contingent workforce, and the
new world of "corporate culture and values."
According to Pat Hill-Hubbard, senior
vice-president of the American Electronics
Association, "employees have become
de¬cision-makers, and management has practically
disappeared." Doug Henton, representing Joint
Venture Silicon Valley, announced, "Unions as
they have existed in the past are no longer
relevant. Labor law of 40 years ago is not
appropriate to 20th cen¬tury economics."
Not everyone agreed. "The company always
told us that they had to be competitive," said
Romie Manan, describing his years at National
Semiconductor. "Increasing the company's
profitability, they said, would increase our job
security. That was the purpose of our work teams
- to make us efficient and productive. So we
became more efficient. Our yield rate on each
wafer went from 80% to 95%.
"Then the company took the ideas
contributed by the experienced workforce in Santa
Clara, which they got through the team meetings,
and used them to orga¬nize new fabs with
inexperienced workers in Arlington, Texas, where
wages are much lower. The experienced workers
lost their jobs. The team meetings stole our
experience and ideas, and didn't give us any
power to protect our jobs and families. The
company chewed us up and spit us out."
In the heyday of the UE Electronics
Organizing Committee, the plant had almost ten
thousand workers, working directly for National
Semiconductor. By the time Manan was laid off in
the early 1990s, employment had fallen to 7000.
Over half worked for temporary employment
agencies, including almost all production and
tech workers. Manpower, the temp agency, had an
office on the plant floor.
Intel Corporation presented a panel of
speakers to shoot Manan down. Phuli Siddiqi, an
Intel worker, presented "a worker's perspective"
-- that "Intel is a great place to work." She
described "worker ownership of projects and
products," and the company's program for
em¬ployee recognition, called "pat on the back."
But she couldn't deny that Intel jobs were
vanishing from Silicon Valley overnight.
Personnel Director Kimberley Dyess even declared
that "there are no more jobs at Intel. We just
have people and work to be done."
The high level of participation by
electronics companies in the Dunlop hearing
reflected their unspoken worry that many of their
new structures for labor/management cooperation
were illegal. At National Semiconductor,
according to Manan, the company told workers they
had to team up with management in order to defeat
the Japanese competition. Fear for their jobs,
he said, drove workers to join the teams, which
were used to undermine union organizing efforts.
Section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations
Act prohibits company unions, especially as a way
to discourage workers from organizing genuine
union. Dyess emphasized that large electronics
companies wanted to eliminate section 8(a)(2).
Unions took on another part of the dark
underside of high tech employment - the
contin¬gent workforce. Esther Thompson, a
janitor who cleaned Apple's buildings, told
commissioners that "I need two jobs because
neither pays enough to pay my rent, feed my
children and pay my bills." According to Mike
Garcia, president of SEIU Local 1877, "high
technology manufacturing doesn't create
high-wage, high-skill jobs. It patterns itself
after the service sector. Contractors in
manu¬facturing compete over who can drives wages
and benefits the lowest." Labor law, he said,
should tie contractors to the manufacturers they
work for. Big manufacturers control the wages
and work lives of contract workers indirectly,
and they should be responsible for them.
In the only real exchange between commissioners
and witnesses, Thomas Kochan, an MIT management
professor, and Doug Fraser, retired president of
the United Auto Workers, asked industry
representatives if they'd agree to accept
responsibility for contingent or contract
workers, or allow workplace committees to
repre¬sent workers in dealing with management
over wages and working conditions. "We're not
looking for someone to represent employees,"
responded Debo¬rah Barber from Quantum Corp.
"The concept of representation seems
archaic," added Cheryl Fields-Tyler from the
American Electronics Association. When Fraser
asked them what alterna¬tives existed for workers
unhappy with management decisions, Debra Engel,
vice-president of 3-Com answered: "the company
has an open-door policy."
The audience laughed.
Conclusion
Perhaps the most telling comment about
the state of labor law is that the most effective
organizing activity among workers is that which
depends on the law the least. While this seems
to give up any immediate hope of reform, labor
law reform efforts ultimately depend on rising
organizing activity on the ground. As Frederick
Douglass said, "power concedes nothing without a
demand."
According to Steve Lerner, architect of
the national Justice for Janitors strategy, the
National Labor Relations Act was only passed in
response to large-scale strikes and organizing
drives. "Workers will get better laws," he said,
"not because they're a good idea, but because the
level of conflict is so disruptive that a
rational system is better." Douglass called it
"thunder and lightening," and the "awful roar" of
the ocean's waters.
In the fall of 1995, a new leadership was
elected to head the AFL-CIO. John Sweeney, who
had been president of the Service Employees, and
a staunch supporter of Justice for Janitors,
became the federation's new president. During
the struggle over leadership Tom Donahue, the
interim AFL-CIO president whom Sweeney defeated,
tried to convince convention delegates that the
federation was really a narrow "trade union
movement." He attacked his opponents for
supporting a "labor movement," or "social
movement," one that would move away from
Washington and into the streets, organizing and
speaking for immigrants and low-wage workers, in
unions and out of them. Militancy, he said,
"marginalizes" the labor movement.
Debating him on the floor of the
convention, Sweeney advocated a commitment to use
direct action tactics where necessary to organize
workers on a much larger scale. In the end, most
AFL-CIO delegates saw Donahue's vision as the
source of labor's marginalization, not the
solution to it, and elected Sweeney instead.
In many ways, the Sweeney program for
change was more limited than the movement that
propelled it into office, seeking to solve most
problems by hiring staff, and organizing
committees and taskforces within the AFL-CIO
structure. The strategy was called by one
supporter "revolution from above." Sweeney and
his supporters inherited the mental framework
that saw organizing drives primarily as the
product of paid staff, rather than as an upsurge
among workers themselves.
Ten years later, Sweeney's own union, the
Service Employees, left the AFL-CIO along with
several others calling for a greater emphasis on
organizing activity. The debate between them,
however, revolved primarily around how much money
to spend, and how many organizers to hire, rather
than a deeper challenge to the staff-driven
model. The Silicon Valley strategy for uniting
community organizations and unions in a
grassroots campaign to defend workers as they
actively tried to organize moved away from a
reliance on the activity of workers themselves.
Newer, non-NLRB strategies advocated by SEIU and
others often relied on gaining employer
neutrality and agreement to card-check
recognition. That process many times involved
bargains with employers at a very high level, far
removed from workers themselves.
It is extremely unlikely that high tech
companies, with their history of total hostility
to unions, would ever agree to such measures
without a virtual revolution in their workforce.
Neither the AFL-CIO nor the Change to Win
federation are likely to assign vast new
resources to help organize that kind of social
movement among workers in the electronics
industry in Silicon Valley.
Yet Silicon Valley is the citadel, the
fortress of the country's most anti-union
industry. Overcoming it has the same strategic
importance that organizing the steel and auto
industries in Pittsburgh and Detroit had in the
great industrial union upsurge of the 1930s. For
the working-class and communities of color in
Silicon Valley to assert their own interests, and
to ensure that economic development meets their
needs, the workers in the valley's plants must be
organized. High tech industry dominates every
aspect of life in Silicon Valley, and its voice
is virtually unchallenged on questions of public
policy, because the workers who have created the
valley's fabulous wealth have no voice of their
own.
Strong, democratic, rank-and-file unions
in the electronics plants can give them that
voice, and in the process change every aspect of
political and economic life. The basic decisions
on issues of living standards, job relocation,
toxic pollution, housing, discrimination, and
economic development could then be made by the
people those decisions affect the most, rather
than by employers or public officials, whether
well-intentioned or not.
In the 1920s the steel and auto
industries also seemed like insurmountable
bastions that unions would never organize. And
yet a decade later, as a result of a radical
social movement based among workers themselves,
they were organized in a matter of a few years.
This is the challenge of Silicon Valley, the goal
sought by its working people for three decades.
Biographical note: David Bacon worked at
National Semiconductor for a number of years
until he was fired in 1982. He was president of
the UE Electronics Organizing Committee from 1978
to 1983, and was the lead UE organizer assigned
to the Versatronex strike.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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