Worthless Promises in Silicon Valley

Abstract

10 | International Union Rights | 25/3 FOCUS | INDUSTRY 4.0 Today Silicon Valley remains the fortress of the country’s most anti-union industry. High tech industry dominates every aspect of life. Its voice is largely unchallenged on public policy, because the workers who have created the valley’s fabulous wealth have no voice of their own. Corpora¬tions like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and National Semiconductor told their workers and communities for years that healthy bottom lines would guarantee rising living standards and secure jobs. Economists still paint a picture of the industry as a massive industrial engine fuelling economic growth, benefiting workers and communities alike. The promises are worthless. Today many giants of 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, labour 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. Apple Corp. has cash reserves in excess of $1 billion, while San Jose voters are told that there is no money to pay for the pensions of workers who’ve spent their lives in public service. The productivity of industry in the valley went up in the 2000s by 42 percent. But at the same time, average annual employment went down 16 percent. The upper income stratum of the valley benefited from this productivity growth, but there was no corresponding growth in jobs. Between 2000 and 2010 the number of households with incomes under $10,000 more than doubled, from 11,556 to 26,310. But despite obstacles, for its entire history Silicon Valley has been as much a cauldron of resistance and new strategies for labour and community organising as it has been for the production of fabulous wealth. High-tech builds its anti-union model and workers respond The anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940s and ‘50s bred a fratricidal struggle in the US labour movement. This led to the expulsion of the union founded to organise workers in the electrical industry—the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). While the new high-tech industry was growing in the Santa Clara Valley, the union that could have organised it, had it retained its strength and members won in the 1930s, was severely damaged. In the rest of the labour movement, support for workers organising unions in the expanding plants virtually disappeared. From the beginning of the electronics industry in the late 1960s, high tech workers faced an industrywide anti-union policy. “Remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies… The great hope for our nation is to avoid those deep, deep divisions between workers and management”, said Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel Corp. The expanding electronics plants were laboratories for developing personnel-management techniques for maintaining ‘a union-free environment’. Some of those techniques, 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. A co-inventor of the transistor and founder of an early Silicon Valley laboratory, William Shockley, espoused theories of the genetic inferiority of African-Americans. As Shockley, Noyce and others guided development in the Valley, they instituted policies that effectively segregated its workforce. In electronics plants women were the overwhelming 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. AfricanAmerican workers were frozen out almost entirely. Starting in the early 1970s, workers began to form organising 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...