The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy

5. The Political Economy of Work and Health in Silicon Valley

The Political Economy of Work and Health in Silicon Valley Nitric acid, one of the most heavily used chemicals in the electronics industry, is very nasty stuff. Inhaling even small amounts can kill a person, filling the lungs with suffocating fluid. If nitric acid gets in your eyes, they sizzle and shrink. Where it touches your flesh, the skin dies and eventually becomes black and shrunken, a process called “coagulation necrosis.” If it splashes down your throat, you might literally vomit your guts out. That’s not the kind of image most people get when they think about the high-tech industry. —Christopher Cook and Clay Thompson, “Silicon Hell” Introduction While several writers and scholars have examined Silicon Valley’s hightech industries in recent years,1 we present a much broader range of occupations in which low-wage and/or “unskilled” workers are concentrated there.2 This includes the core jobs in semiconductor production and the periphery jobs in printed circuit board, printer, and cable assembly , including home-based piecework and prison labor. By placing this story in an environmental justice framework, we contribute to the burgeoning effort by some scholars to center the workplace in EJ struggles.3 This is important for several reasons. Historians have demonstrated that our knowledge of industrial toxins—the same knowledge that fueled the modern-day environmental movement—is rooted in medical studies of workplace hazards generated in the early twentieth century.4 This point is crucial because it underscores what some contemporary environmental justice and labor leaders have often argued: (1) that industrial workers were among the first victims of, and the first to resist, environmental pollution; and (2) if the pollution from 5 85 smokestacks imposed upon communities is significant, then the impacts on the workforce inside the factories must be as great if not greater. We also integrate into environmental justice studies a serious consideration of the role of gender. As with each of the previous economic systems that predominated in the Santa Clara Valley region, gender plays a major role in Silicon Valley’s contemporary environmental justice struggles. We draw our data from a wealth of archival, documentary, interview , and first-hand ethnographic sources, as well as legal depositions, to present a portrait of the Silicon Valley workplace like none other.5 Building on previous chapters, we argue that contemporary environmental inequalities in Silicon Valley’s electronics industry are the result of a combination of (1) historical patterns of labor migration and the concentration of a multi-ethnic, immigrant, and non-union workforce in the region; (2) industry’s introduction of environmentally destructive technologies and authoritarian control over the labor process; and (3) the degree of autonomy, organization, and resistance among workers and social movement organizations. These are the underlying factors in the continuing battle over private profit, good jobs, and natural resources in Santa Clara County, which began in 1769. Silicon Valley Industry: Its Size, Scope, and Workforce While it has long been acknowledged that the United States has largely shifted from a goods-producing or manufacturing economy to a service economy, manufacturing remains key to the nation’s fiscal health. The largest manufacturing industry in the United States and the world is the electronics sector, and “because of its growth and size, the chip industry is the pivotal driver of the world economy.”6 In 2000, U.S.-based electronics companies employed more than 280,000 people worldwide (up from 265,000 in 1998), and all electronics firms employed 2.4 million persons worldwide. Globally, electronics is a $300 billion industry. Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also one of the world’s most profitable companies, with a market value of $117.6 billion in 1998—more than the Big Three auto makers combined.7 More than 220 billion microchips are manufactured annually.8 Electronics is a highly competitive industry that includes the production of semiconductors, microchips, disk drives, circuit boards, consumer electronics, communications devices, and video display equip86 | Chapter 5 ment. The manufacture of high-tech electronics goods has also spurred an extraordinary increase in those industries that produce the materials and chemicals that supply electronics firms and those companies that treat, recycle, and dispose of hazardous waste generated in the electronics production process.9 By 1986, the computer and semiconductor industries made up 50 percent of Silicon Valley’s manufacturing employment. And though many Silicon Valley firms are shifting production jobs offshore...