Land of the Open Shop: The Long Struggle to Organize Silicon Valley

David Bacon

A hunger striker in front of Mountain View, California's Digital Microwave Corporation.

On January 29, 1993 workers at the Versatronex plant in Sunnyvale, California filed out of its doors, one last time, before the plant was closed. "We said at the beginning that if the company was going to shut down, let them," said Sandra Gomez, a Versatronex striker. "But as long as the plant was open, we were going to fight for our rights."

Versatronex was the first Silicon Valley plant struck by production employees, and these were the first Silicon Valley strikers to win recognition for their union. Their struggle demolished some of the most cherished myths about the high-tech workforce, and showed that Silicon Valley workers—like workers anywhere under the right circumstances—are willing to fight to end sweatshop conditions.

Corporations like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and National Semiconductor told their workers for years that healthy bottom lines would guarantee rising living standards and secure jobs. Economists called the electronics industry a massive, growth-fueling industrial engine, benefiting workers and communities alike. No unions were needed.

Those promises were worthless. Today, many giants of the industry own no factories at all. Contract manufacturers build computers and make chips in locations from China to Hungary. In the valley's remaining factories, 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.

Living standards continue to rise for a privileged elite at the top of the workforce, but they've fallen on the production line. Tens of thousands of workers were dropped off the line entirely as manufacturing left the valley. Permanent jobs became temporary, and then disappeared altogether. Instead of representing a clean industry with no layoffs, Silicon Valley found itself saddled with toxic contamination of its water supply, chemically-induced industrial illnesses, and extreme insecurity in its working-class neighborhoods.

Despite these obstacles, for three decades the valley was also a cauldron of workplace organizing to oppose inhumane conditions. Some workers, like the janitors, experienced remarkable success. Others, however—especially production workers in the plants them-selves—found a harder road. The labor movement often seemed to accept the industry's mythology that electronics workers can't, or won't, organize.

Sandra Gomez's determination showed just how wrong that idea is. Instead, those decades of activity should give unions hope that the "unorganizable industry" can be defeated, and ideas for tactics that can accomplish that goal.

The First Effort—Organizing Semiconductor Workers

In the early 1970s, workers began to form organizing committees—affiliated with the UE (the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers union)—at National Semiconductor, Siltec, Fairchild, Siliconix, Semi-Metals, and other semiconductor manufacturing plants (or factories that supplied raw materials to them). Amy Newell helped start a rank-and-file organizing committee at Siliconix. Two decades later she became the UE's national secretary-treasurer, the highest-ranking female union officer in the U.S. at the time. She recalls concentrating on the larger plants because "the capital investment 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." Newell says organizing high-tech workers requires "a long-term commitment, with an industry-wide approach. It's hard to imagine organizing any plant without a much larger movement in the industry as a whole, and in the communities in which the workers live." By the early 1980s, the UE Electronics Organizing Committee had a core membership of more than five hundred workers who participated in a number of campaigns.

For years, there was no union staff person in Silicon Valley. At the height of its activity, a single organizer—Michael Eisenscher—was the committee's link to the national union, running the union mimeograph machine from his garage. The committee's strategy envisioned...