http://www.igc.org/trac/internet/globalabor/dbacon.html에서
퍼왔습니다. 서론만 번역해봤습니다. 원문은 서론 번역문
아래에 있습니다. 실리콘 밸리에서의 노동자들의 상황을
어느정도 짐작할 수 있는 글이라 생각됩니다.
밸리에서 노동자 조직화 - 서론
1993년 1월 29일 서니베일에 있는 Versatronex공장의 막지막 노동자들은
공장패업의 마지막날 해고 되었다. 공자의 기계는 꺼？고 터럭에 실려졌
다. Versatronex공장은 현재 망해서 없어졌지만. 그러나 실리콘 밸리의
많은 전자회사 노동자들은, 특히 맥시코나 중앙아메리카에서 이주한 노동
자들은 여전히 그 이름을 기억하고 있ㅎ다. Versatronex는 실리콘밸리에
서 생산직노동자들에 의해 처음으로 파업을 한 공자이었으며 그 파업으로
첫 번째로 노동조합의 필요성을 인식하게된 공장이었다.
"우리는 만약 회사가 문을 닫는다면 그렇게 하겠금 내버려 두겠다. 그러
나 공장이 돌아가는한 우리는 우리권리를 위해 싸울 것이다" Versatronex
의 마지막 파업으로 직장을 잃은 Sandra Gomez는 이렇게 말했다. 노동착
취에 대한 대항과 노동조합 건설를 위한 그들의 정당한 투쟁은 실리콘벨
리 노동자 사이에서 상징이 되었다. 그러한 투쟁은 잘못 자리잡고 있는
하이테크 노동에 관한 관념과 신화를 하나씩 사라지게 하고 있다.
기존의 노동조합은 IBM과 Hewlett-Packard, Intel 그리고 National
Semiconductor과 같은 전자회사들에서는 조직이 불가능하다고 단언하였
다. 또한 이러한 전자회사는 그들의 노동자들에게 '회사는 가족과 같은 곳
이다. 그러므로 노동조합은 필요없다. 일자리는 보장해주고 최저생계비는
생활수준의 향상을 보장해 줄것이다'라고 선전했다. 또?클린튼 행정부의
경제학자들은 실리콘 밸리의 공장들은 전자산업이 지역, 노동자의 경제를
부흥시키는 산업이라는 전망을 선전하였다.
그러나 실리콘 밸리의 노동자의 생활은 대부분의 사람들에게 문제가 있었
다. 몇몇 특권화된 소수 엘리트 노동자들의 생활수준은 행상되었지만 생
산라인의 수천명의 노동자들은 생활수준이 하락하였으며, 수만명의 노동
자들은 생산공장이 다른나라 혹은 다른지역으로 이주해감에 따라 완전히
해고되었다. 많은 회사들은 종신고용이라는 그들의 맹세를 저버린 것이다.
또한 클린한 이미지의 산업은 실리콘밸리의 식수를 독성으로 오염시키고
화학약품으로 병들게하는 유령으로 바뀌었다.
실기콘밸리의 첨단기술 노동자들은 이러한 상태에 대응하기위해 조직화를
위한 새로운 전술의 중요성을 ㄲ닿게 되었다. '수위'와 같은 일부 그룹들
은 이러한 전술을 성공적으로 사용하여 새로운 성과를 남겼다. 그러나 생
산공장의 노동자들에게는 이러한 조직화 작업은 수십년동안 더욱 지루하
고 어려운것으로 보였다.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Organizing Silicon Valley's High Tech Workers
by David Bacon
Introduction
On January 29, 1993 the last workers at the Versatronex plant in Sunnyvale
filed out of the plant's door for the last time. The machines in the factory
were turned off and loaded onto trucks. Versatronex was no longer a living
entity. But many electronics workers in Silicon Valley, especially immigrants
from Mexico and Central America, still remember the name. They remember that
Versatronex was the first plant in Silicon Valley struck by production
workers, and the first plant where a strike won recognition for their union.
"We said at the beginning that if the company was going to close, let them
close," said Sandra Gomez, who lost her job at the end of the Versatronex
strike. "But as long as the plant was open, we were going to fight for our
rights." The struggle of Versatronex workers against their sweatshop
conditions, and for their right to organize a union, became a symbol of the
growing turmoil among workers in Silicon Valley. That turmoil has demolished,
one after another, the most deepseated myths and stereotypes about the high
tech workforce.
Unions have called the electronics industry "unorganizable" Corporations like
IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and National Semiconductor have 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 in the Clinton administration
paint a picture of the electronics industry as a massive industrial engine
fueling economic growth, benefitting workers and communities alike.
But working life in Silicon Valley has become problematic for thousands of
people. While living standards rise for a privileged elite at the top of the
workforce, they drop for thousands of workers on the production line. Tens of
thousands of workers have been dropped off the line entirely, as production
leaves the valley for other states and countries, while companies eliminate
their historic no-layoff pledge. Permanent jobs have become temporary. The
image of the clean industry has been replaced by the spectre of toxic
contamination of the valley's water supply, and a high occurrence of
chemically-induced industrial illness.
Silicon Valley's high-tech workers are finding important new tactics for
organizing to oppose these conditions. Some groups, like the janitors, have
wielded these techniques with remarkable success, winning groundbreaking
achievements. For others, including production workers in the plants
themselves, the road seems longer and harder. But the level of organized
activity is higher than it has been for over a decade.
The Development of the High Tech Workforce
One of the oldest myths about high technology industry is that it was the
brainchild of a few, brilliant (white) men, who started in their garages the
giant corporations which now dominate economic life in Silicon Valley. In
fact, the basic technological innovations which form the foundation of the
electronics industry, such as the invention of the solid-state transistor,
took place in the laboratories of such corporations as 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 which began after World War Two. Long before the appearance of the
personal computer, high tech industry grew on defense contracts and rising
military budgets.
Its Cold War roots affected every aspect of the industry, from its attitude
to- wards unions to the structure of its plants and workforce.
As the electronics industry started to grow in the 1950's, the fratricidal
struggle within the U.S. labor movement, which led to the expulsion of a
number of unions and many union members for their leftwing politics, reached
its height. 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 Electric Corp.
in particular, helped to ensure the fragmentation of the workforce in the
electrical industry among 13 different unions, with a great portion of
workers 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 was at its lowest point in decades.
From the beginning, high tech workers had to face an industry-wide anti-
union policy. Robert Noyce, who participated in the invention of the
transistor, 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 between workers and management which can
paralyze action."
The expanding electronics plants were laboratories for developing personnel-
management techniques for maintaining "a union-free environment." Some of
those techniques pioneered in Silicon Valley, like the team-concept method
for organizing workers on the plant floor, were then used to weaken unions in
other industries, from auto-manufacturing to steel-making.
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 instituted policies which effectively segregated its workforce.
Silicon Valley electronics plants employed a production workforce in which
women were the overwhelming majority, in plants where the engineering and
management staff consisted overwhelmingly of men. Immigrants from Asian and
Latin American countries were drawn to the valley's production lines, while
engineering and management jobs went to white employees.
Today, Asian workers make up 30% of the skilled production workforce, 47% of
the semiskilled workforce, and 41% of the unskilled workforce. Latinos
constitute 18% of skilled workers, 21% of semiskilled workers, and 36% of
unskilled workers. Both groups together are only 17% of management employees,
and 25% of professional and engineering employees. The same picture holds
true for women. While 23% of management employees are women, and 29% of
professionals, women are 80% of clerical employees, 40% of skilled workers,
60% of semiskilled workers, and 50% of unskilled workers.
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
written extensively on the status of women in high tech industry, explains
the segregation as a conscious decision on the part of manufacturers.
"Employers assume foreign-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 the high tech workforce for
many years were the workers 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 which supplied raw materials to those plants.
One participant in this upsurge was a young woman who helped start a rank-
and-file organizing committee at the Siliconix plant in the early 1970s. Amy
Newell eventually became the national secretary-treasurer of the United
Electrical Workers (UE), the highest-ranking woman union officer in the U.S.
at the time.
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. Nevertheless, it was very hard organizing a union in those
plants, because the feeling of powerlessness among the workers was so
difficult to overcome."
To organize unions in the large electronics manufacturing plants, Newell says
"it seems obvious 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 communities 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 other Filipino immigrant workers on the production lines at
National Semiconductor Corp. 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, and in front of other plants where union members were afraid to make
their union sympathies public. "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 and its chief
organizational resource, running the union mimeograph machine in his own
garage.
The strategy of the UE Electronics Organizing Committee envisioned a
prolonged 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
Semiconductor, fired many of the leading union activists, and the committee
gradually dispersed as its members sought work where they could find it. The
main strategic question which the committee sought to answer remains
unresolved.
In large electronics manufacturing plants, employing sometimes more than
10,000 workers, the process of organization is not something which takes
place overnight. For a long period of time union-minded workers, especially
active ones, are a minority of the workforce. Their organization has to be
active on the plant floor, winning over the majority of workers as it fights
around the basic conditions which affect them. In the process, it has to be
able to help its members survive in an extreme anti-union climate.
This kind of long-term perspective is very different from the organizing
style found in most unions today, which still view union organizing as a
process of winning union representation elections administered by the
National Labor Relations Board. Since the prospects at present of
successfully fighting a union election campaign inside a semiconductor or
computer-building plant are extremely remote, 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 U.E. Electronics Organizing Committee was a
nexus of activity, out of 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 U.E. committee who left the plants to work on its staff. It
built broad ties with other unions, with occupational health and safety
experts, and with community activists. It fought successfully for the
elimination of such carcinogenic chemicals as trichloroethylene, and for the
rights 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 illness.
Under pressure from SCCOSH and other health and safety groups, the
Semiconductor 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," explains Flora Chu, Director of SCCOSH's
Asian Workers' Program, "we have to talk in a new way. Many immigrants, for
instance, 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 which ripped apart the image of the "clean industry." The Toxics
Coalition won national recognition when it exposed the large-scale
contamination of the water table throughout Silicon Valley by electronics
manufacturers. Coalition activists organized the communities surrounding the
plants, and forced the Environmental 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. Today, that
policy has taken its toll, as over 30,000 semiconductor production jobs have
been relocated to other parts of the U.S. and Europe. In 1983 the plants
employed 102,200 workers; they employed only 73,700 workers ten years later.
While the number of engineers and managers has increased slightly, job losses
have fallen much more heavily on operators and technicians. "What this really
means," according to Romie Manan, still working as a production technician at
National Semiconductor, "is that Filipino workers in particular have lost
their jobs by the thousands, more than any other national group." Manan
himself 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 produce more
efficiently. When technology 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 question.
Howard High, a public relations spokesperson at Intel Corp., states flatly
that "I really don't think we'll see more semiconductor manufacturing in
Silicon Valley in the future." In 1993 Intel built a new $1 billion plant in
Rio Rancho, New Mexico instead of California. High says 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
construction. California put in a bid as well, but couldn't match the
subsidies offered by New Mexico.
Manan and other semiconductor workers believe that lower wages are the
determining 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 says.
"New workers also earn a starting wage, around $6-7/hour, unlike those of us
with many years in the plants here, who earn more as a consequence. That's
why National and other companies won't allow workers to transfer to the other
plants."
Whether the main factor is wages or industrial revenue bonds, large
electronics companies have been able to initiate bidding wars, in which
communities around the country compete to win new production facilities by
guaranteeing a combination of cost savings, the relaxation of regulations,
and direct tax subsidies. In Silicon Valley, that competition is creating a
two-tier workforce. The more permanent jobs in the large manufacturing plants
are disappearing. But contractors who provide services to the large
companies, from janitorial and food services to the assembly of circuit
boards, employ more workers every year.
The New Wave - Organizing the Contractors
Conditions for janitors and contract assemblers are a far cry from those
associated in the public mind with high tech manufacturing. Workers losing
jobs on wafer fabrication lines in the semiconductor plants make as much as
$11-14/hour for operators, and more for technicians. Companies provide
medical insurance, sick leave, vacations and other benefits. By contrast,
contract assemblers and non-union janitors are paid close to the minimum wage
of $4.25/hour, have no medical insurance, and often no benefits at all. The
decline in living standards has made the service and sweatshop economy in
Silicon Valley the new focus for workers' organizing activity.
In effect, workers in the service and sweatshop sector have been fighting to
win wages and benefits close to the level of those won by semiconductor
workers at the time of the previous peak in organizing activity ten years
earlier. Over that period of time, the workforce of Silicon Valley has been
forced to take a giant step backward.
The spark which set off this new wave was the campaign to organize the
janitors 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 employer sanctions
provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, that it maintain written
proof of employees' legal status. When almost none of Shine's workers could
present the required documents, they were fired. The company 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 year-long 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 Local 1877. "So a community coalition went to picket when our
union couldn't, supported the workers with a hunger strike, and started a
boycott of Apple products." 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."
The campaign at Shine and Apple was closely watched by other employers in the
valley. 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. Conditions at
Versatronex give credence to the accusation by labor and community activists
that a high tech image masks a reality of sweatshop conditions. The starting
wage at the plant was $4.25 - the minimum wage - 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
chemical baths, and drying them off in ovens. "They never told us the names
or the dangers of the chemicals we worked with," he recalls. "Sometimes the
vapors were so strong that our noses would begin to bleed."
The conditions in the "coil room" are very different from those at IBM's own
facilities in South San Jose, which it refers to as a "campus." IBM's orders
gave a big boost to Versatronex' contract assembly business for 20 years, and
workers recall 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 will have no
responsibility for them.
Workers at Versatronex called in the UE after they had already organized
themselves to protest these conditions, and as they were preparing to stop
work to demand changes. When the company heard rumors of the stoppage, they
held a meeting to head off the planned action. One worker, Joselito Mun~oz,
stood up in the meeting and declared to company supervisors that "se acabo el
tiempo de la esclavitud," which means "the time of slavery is over." Mun~oz
was fired two days later, and on October 16 Verstronex workers went on strike
to win his job back.
In the course of their strike, workers focussed on a large customer whose
boards were assembled at Versatronex -- Digital Microwave Corporation. 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 strikers went on
a hunger strike outside DMC's glittering offices. For four days they fasted
to dramatize their effort to hold the manufacturer responsible for their
working conditions. Male strikers supported them by setting up tents and
living around the clock on the sidewalk outside its front door. Word of their
action spread like an electric current 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 at
Versatronex.
In the course of the strike, the workers and the union drew from these
experiences workers brought with them from Mexico, including 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," according
to Maria Pantoja, a UE organizer and Mexico City native. "Even striking over
the firing of another worker is a reflection of our culture of mutual
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., began a similar struggle for
justice. Their employer closed the factory doors owing them two weeks pay,
not an uncommon event in the lives of contract laborers in many industries.
USM workers turned to the Korean Resource Center, a community service agency
in Silicon Valley's growing 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. "The bank refused to pay because they
said the workers had no power," according to Bumshik Eom, a KRC staff member.
In the course of their struggle workers formed an organization to provide
services, job referrals and education programs to Korean immigrants.
"Although some workers wanted to form a union, the belief which others
brought from Korea was that unions are communist," Eom says. "But workers
could agree on forming an organization to help each other, and to educate
each other on their rights as workers."
Despite differences in union experience among different immigrant
nationalities, many trade unionists believe that the immigrant workforce is
fertile ground for the message of unionism. Immigrant workers are on the
bottom, they say, in terms of wages, working conditions, and the quality of
life in immigrant communities. The Versatronex strike, and movements like
them among other South Bay workers, are upheavals from below, according to
Pantoja. "They shine a light on conditions which are like apartheid for
immigrants and sweatshop workers in Silicon Valley."
According to SEIU organizers, immigrants are the vast majority of building
maintenance workers in many U.S. cities. That poses special problems for the
union, but it also creates important advantages. Immigrants have a harder
time, they explain, standing up for their rights in front of the employer,
because they are often unaware of their rights as workers. In addition,
sanctions and the threat of deportation make the risk of losing a job much
higher than for non-immigrants. Vulnerability to the employer, and the
weakness of legal protections, are primary reasons why Justice for Janitors,
SEIU's national organizing strategy, doesn't rely on elections administered
by the National Labor Relations Board.
Instead, the union combines intense community pressure with an allout attack
on the parent corporation. Marches, demonstrations, sit-ins and other mass
actions mobilize the pressure of workers against the employer. The militant
history of many immigrants becomes a positive advantage for the union. Eliseo
Medina, another SEIU leader, explains that "when you come from a country
where they shoot you for being a unionist or a striker, then getting fired
from your job doesn't seem so bad. Immigrants from Central America have a
much more militant history as unionists than we do, and the more militant
workers 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 election process
administered by the NLRB. One worker out of every ten involved in a union
organizing drive was fired as a result in the last ten years. Employers can
shift production, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on expert anti-union
consultants, and use the fear of job loss to exert enormous pressure on
workers. Although technically illegal, these hardball tactics go effectively
unpunished when unions and workers rely exclusively on the NLRB's legal
process.
Tactics like those used at Apple and Versatronex are at the cutting edge of
the labor movement's search for new ways to organize. They rely strongly on
close alliances between workers, unions and communities to offset the power
exercised by employers. They use organizing tactics based on action by
workers themselves, rather than on a lengthy propaganda war during a
high-pressure election campaign, which companies almost inevitably win.
Grassroots tactics respond well to the basic issues of low wages and bad
conditions prevalent in contract and sweatshop employment. They also
contribute to 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 to challenge exploitive conditions for 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
conditions for immigrant workers. Workers, unions and community organizations
recognized that it is impossible for any single organization to challenge
high tech industry alone.
That point was brought home later, when Versatronex closed its plant in
January, 1993. Workers ended their strike the previous November, and filed a
petition for a representation election in December. "We believe that when the
company knew they would lose the election, they decided to close," Pantoja
says. "In an industry as anti-union as electronics, I assume that the
manufacturers told Versatronex that they 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 seems to have
drawn a line between outside services, and the assembly contractors who are
part of the industry's basic production process. In one section, unions can
be grudgingly recognized; in the other, they cannot.
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
effectively 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
organizations 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 regulatory relaxation, education, and resources for
technological development.
The labor/community coalition pointed to issues unaddressed by Joint
Venture. It drew up a Silicon Valley Pledge, calling on companies to respect
the rights of workers and communities, and deal with them as equals.
Ernestina Garcia, a community activist in San Jose's Chicano community since
the 1960s, 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," according to Jorge Gonzalez,
chairperson of the Cleaning Up Silicon Valley Coalition. "Economic
development in Silicon Valley has historically served the interests of the
few. We want development 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 electronics 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, called for discarding tactics
dependent on elections administered by the National Labor Relations Board,
saying they were a losing strategy. Instead, he advocated the community-based
approach used against Apple and Versatronex. 'We're going back to the 1930s,"
he said. "We're going to combine strong and militant action in the workplace
with effective corporate campaigns. 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 international unions, including the
janitors' union, the Teamsters, the hotel and restaurant workers, and the
clothing workers, formed an overall strategy committee and contributed
researchers and organizers to a common pool. Two community representatives
also sat on the strategy committee, making joint planning decisions with
union representatives.
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.
The campaign was eventually folded into the effort to renew union contracts
for the valley's janitors. In Justice for Janitors style, immigrant workers
organized sit-in demonstrations blocking streets and expressways. They also
threw the union's resources into the statewide effort to defeat the
anti-immigrant initiative on the 1994 ballot, Proposition 187. Local 1877
organizers were the backbone of the anti-187 effort in Silicon Valley, which
was headquartered in the union's office.
Electronics Companies Press for Political Changes
After President Clinton was elected in 1992, high technology companies began
using their support for him during the election to pressing for political
changes. Among those they sought were ones in labor law which would, they
said, bring it into line with what they called new realities. Unions and
workers also wanted changes, including enforcement of existing rights, and
new legislation to take into account the proliferation of contracted and
temporary work.
The Clinton administration set up a commission to review labor law reform,
the Commission on the Future of Labor-Management Relations, known as the
Dunlop commission for its chairman, John Dunlop, labor secretary 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."
In a step that drew much union criticism, when the Dunlop commission's key
hearing in Silicon Valley was convened by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley at
the request of Marty Manley, then the Department of Labor's Deputy Secretary
for the American Workplace.
Silicon Valley firms have had the ear of the Clinton administration. The
president and vice-president have made numerous high-profile visits to
company facilities, valley executives were prominent in Clinton's 1992
election campaign, and his chair of the Joint Council of Economic Advisors
was Laura d'Andrea Tyson, a UC Berkeley professor with strong ties to the
industry. The valley has been the administration's showpiece for revitalizing
the U.S. economy, giving industry's point of view on labor law reform a lot
of weight in Washington.
Ironically, the Dunlop Commission was set up under pressure from unions, who
hoped it would examine the failure of existing labor law to enforce workplace
rights. Union after union came to hearings in other parts of the country,
documenting wholesale violations of existing labor law. Enforcement of the
National Labor Relations Act, they said, has become a joke.
In Silicon Valley, the lines in the labor law debate were drawn more clearly
than in the hearing which preceded it. In fact, one commission member, Bill
Usery, labor secretary under President Ford, noted that in other parts of the
country most corporate testimony took the position that little reform of
labor law was needed. By implication, labor law and the administration of the
NLRB have become so ineffective that companies believe it is no longer a
significant restraint on their union-fighting activities.
But corporate executives in Silicon Valley were not content with simple
inaction. Their program which not only called for extensive changes, but
involved a whole new philosophy and public policy for labor/management
relations. The San Jose hearing pulled the veil from their proposals. In the
process, it also unveiled even further the close connections between high
tech industry and the Clinton administration.
Under the kleig 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 vicepresident of the American Electronics
Association, "employees have become decision-makers, and management has
practically disappeared." She called for "a new public policy for
labor-management relations." Doug Henton, representing Joint Venture, was
even more blunt. "Unions as they have existed in the past are no longer
relevant," he said. "Labor law of 40 years ago is not appropriate to 20th
century economics."
Not everyone agreed. Amy Dean, the new business manager of the South Bay
AFL-CIO Labor Council, warned the commission to "be cautious, that in our
haste to reform, we not have the fox guarding the hen house and call that
cooperation." The problem, she noted, was that cooperation was only possible
"when each party recognizes the legitimacy of the other."
According to many workers and union representatives, the new workplace is one
divided between the haves and have nots, where permanent jobs are being
abolished, and low-wage jobs in contract services and manufacturing are
expanding. Even in the big plants belonging to Silicon Valley's largest
employers, workers contested the rosy descriptions of a new era in
labor/management cooperation.
"The company always told us that they had to be competitive," according to
Romie Manan. "Increasing the company's profitability, they said, would
increase our job security. That was the purpose of our workteams - to make us
efficient and productive. 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
organize 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."
Manan lost his job after 16 years at the National Semiconductor plant. "The
company chewed us up and spit us out," Manan told the commission bitterly.
The workplace of the future "turned out to be the same old thing."
On the other hand, Intel Corporation's Kirby Dyess, vicepresident of human
relations, led a whole panel of speakers whose choreographed presentation,
complete with bullet comments projected from an overhead projector, dwelt at
length on elaborate structures in the workplace to promote productivity.
Phuli Siddiqi, an Intel worker, presented "a worker's perspective." She
described "Intel values," which included quality, discipline, risk-taking,
customer orientation, and holding the opinion that "Intel is a great place to
work." She described "worker ownership of projects and products," and the
company's program for employee recognition, called "pat on the back." But
missing from her presentation was any mention of wages, benefits, job
insecurity, or any of the normal day-to-day job concerns that plague most
workers, especially in plants where jobs seem to vanish overnight.
Dyess declared that "there are no more jobs at Intel. We just have people and
work to be done."
The commission heard numerous presentations by representatives of Tandem,
3Com, Applied Materials, the American Electronics Association (AEA), and
other companies. None of them mentioned any problems which might cause
workers to organize unions. In the "high performance workplace," unions
aren't necessary or desired. Work teams have taken their place, they
asserted, and provide workers with a voice.
The high level of participation by electronics companies in the Dunlop
hearing reflected one of their biggest problems. Many of their new structures
for labor/management cooperation are illegal.
A key section of labor law, section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations
Act, prohibits company unions. The law was written in the 1930s, when many
big US corporations tried to organize unions for their workers, in order to
prevent workers from organizing independent unions of their own. Labor law
was intended to outlaw company unions like the Colorado Industrial Plan,
organized by John D. Rockefeller in his Ludlow coal mines, just weeks after
the infamous "Ludlow massacre" of the wives and children of striking miners.
In a recent decision in the case of Electromation Corp., a federal court held
that workteams set up to discourage workers from organizing a separate and
independent union function as the old company unions did. Dyess was very
specific about the desire of large electronics companies to modify that court
decision, and to even eliminate section 8(a)(2). She said that Intel would
turn the heat on in Congress to get rid of it, and expected other companies
in the AEA to do the same.
At National Semiconductor, according to Manan, the company's overall
labor/management cooperation scheme was intended to fight unions. Manan, a
shopfloor leader in the late 1970s and early 1980s of the United Electrical
Workers' Electronics Organizing Committee, described how National set up its
scheme, telling workers that 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.
In the middle of wage cuts and National's first big waves of layoffs, "we
tried to organize a union in my plant and in others," Manan told the
commission. "All the union leaders in my plant except for myself were fired.
Most of the union activists in other plants were fired as well. Although we
filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, no one was ever
rehired, and in many cases the board wouldn't even issue a complaint."
The hearing also saw unions take on another part of the dark underside of
high tech employment - the contingent workforce. Esther Thompson, a janitor
who cleans 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 the valley's janitors' union, Service
Employees Local 1877, "high technology manufacturing, instead of creating the
high-wage, high-skill jobs that will bring prosperity to our country, will
pattern itself after the service sector. The inevitable result," he said,
"will be contractors in manufacturing competing over who can drives wages and
benefits the lowest."
Labor law, he said, should tie contractors to the manufacturers they work
for. At present, although big manufacturers control the wages and work lives
of contract workers indirectly, they have no responsibility for them. If the
janitors who clean Apple's buildings, for instance, lose their jobs because
Apple changes janitorial contractors, workers have no right to picket Apple
itself. If they do, they themselves are violating labor law.
Predictably, high-tech employers oppose this change, along with any other
proposal to enforce organizing rights.
After the hearing adjourned, one of the commissioners, Thomas Kochan, an MIT
management professor, was blunt about the commission's dilemma. "If we bring
the administration a traditional package [of labor law reforms], it'll die on
the vine." In the only real exchange between commissioners and witnesses
during the hearing, both Kochan and commissioner Doug Fraser, past president
of the United Auto Workers, tried to get industry representatives to agree to
a tradeoff in return for concessions on 8(a)(2). Would they agree, for
instance, to accept responsibility for contingent or contract workers, and
allow workplace committees to really represent workers in dealing with
management over wages and working conditions?
"We're not looking for someone to represent employees," responded Deborah
Barber from Quantum Corp. "The concept of representation seems archaic,"
added Cheryl Fields-Tyler from the AEA. When Fraser asked them what
alternatives 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.
When the Dunlop Commission finally made its report months later, it tried to
placate each side in the debate. It made minor concessions to unions by
recommending better enforcement of existing law, and then recommended
altering 8(a)(2) to legalize labor-management cooperation programs.
Ultimately, the dilemma was turned on its head by the election of November,
1994. The Republican Party won a majority in both houses of Congress, and
promptly introduced a bill to accomplish the high-tech agenda on labor law
reform -- the elimination of 8(a)(2) -- with no concession to unions of any
kind. President Clinton then promised the AFL-CIO that he would veto the TEAM
Act, as the Republicans called it. No one wanted to bring up the awkward
point that the administration's own Dunlop Commission had opened the door.
Conclusion
Perhaps the most telling comment about the state of labor law today is that
the most effective organizing activity among workers is that which depends on
the law the least. While it seems that this activity has given up any
immediate hope of reform, labor law reform efforts ultimately depend on
real-life organizing activity.
Steve Lerner, architect of the national Justice for Janitors strategy,
recalls that the National Labor Relations Act was only passed in the 1930s in
response to large- scale strikes and organizing drives. "Workers will get
better laws," Lerner said, "not because that's a good idea, but because the
level of conflict is so disruptive that a rational system is better. Labor
law won't change unless there's a demonstrated need." He calls on unions not
to wait for reforms before making much greater efforts to assist workers who
want to organize unions. "The very fact of organizing is the most compelling
argument for protecting workers' rights," he declares.
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 which
would move away from Washington and into the streets, organizing and speaking
for immigrants and low-wage workers, in unions and out of them.
Donahue called on delegates to "build bridges, not block them," a slap at
Sweeney's union, the Service Employees. The organizing tactics of the union's
showpiece campaign, Justice for Janitors, bring low-wage and minority workers
into the streets, blocking thoroughfares and getting arrested.
Donahue tried to label his opponents as advocates of civil disobedience, in
much the same way his predecessors redbaited the opposition of the past.
Militancy, he said, "marginalizes" the labor movement. Debating him on the
floor of the convention, Sweeney advocated a new 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 is more limited than the
movement which propelled it into office. It seeks to solve most problems by
hiring staff, and organizing committees and taskforces within the AFL-CIO
structure, in a strategy called by one supporter "revolution from above."
Sweeney and his supporters still inherit the mental framework which sees
organizing drives primarily as the product of paid staff, rather than as an
upsurge among workers themselves. But that framework will be challenged, and
perhaps changed, in the course of the large-scale campaigns he proposes.
The new leadership of the AFL-CIO is not likely to assign vast new resources
to help organize the electronics industry in Silicon Valley as it first
priority. Other campaigns, particularly large-scale, immigrant-based drives
in Los Angeles are already underway and are first in line for money and
organizers. But Silicon Valley is the citadel, the fortress of the country's
most anti-union industry. Overcoming it has the same strategic necessity that
organizing the steel and auto industries in Pittsburgh and Detroit had to the
great industrial union upsurge of the 1930s.
For the working-class and minority communities of 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 will give
them that voice, and in the process will 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 must be made by the people those decisions affect the most, not
made for them by employers or public officials, whether well-intentioned or
not.
This is the challenge of Silicon Valley. This is the goal sought-after by its
working people for three decades. While it hasn't been achieved yet, the
struggles which will lead to it are already taking place.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 coordinated the three UE
organizers assigned to the Versatronex strike. He is a freelance writer on
labor and immigration issues, an associate editor for Pacific News Service,
and an award-winning documentary photographer and member of the Impact
Visuals photo cooperative.
The original version of this article was published in Third Force. This
version is excerpted with permission from Zwischen Rassimus und Solidaritat:
Diskriminierung, Einwanderung und Gewerkschaften in den USA, edited by B.
Luethje and C. Scherrer (Munster: Westfalisches Dampfboot, 1997).
