FEATURE

By EUGENE GERMANN

For most of the last decade, corporate
image makers and public relations hucks-
ters have promoted high tech as the savior
of every struggling community.

With visions of clean, modern, campus-
like factories, employee recreation facilities,
BMWs in every garage and computers on
every kitchen table, many have been sold on
the idea that high tech could do no wrong
and would correct whatever presently was
wrong — if given the capital and freedom
to do so.

Cities and towns across the U.S. have
been tripping over themselves to lure a piece
of the action to their door with giveaways
and subsidies. And high tech entrepreneurs,
investors, corporate executives and devel-
opers have been only too willing to accom-
modate them, while playing one community
oF region off against another for the best

But lately some of the enthusiasm has
waned. More than a few worms have turned
up in the apples peddled by high tech prom-
oters.

Toxics have turned up in the drinking
water in high tech citadels like the Silcon
Valley. The industry’s squeaky-clean image
has been undermined by the growing reali-
zation that high teach thrives on a witch’s
brew of the most hazardous chemicals used
in any industry.

Environmental contamination is only
part of the problem. High tech workers are
especially at risk — exposed to toxics at
their source and again in the community.
Electronics. workers suffer occupational
illness at a rate three times that of the aver-
age California manufacturing worker.

These figures were so alarming that Sil-
icon Valley electronics companies changed
the way they report occupational illness.
The state government then stopped publish-
ing figures provided by the industry because
they were considered unreliable, mislead-
ing, or doctored.

6 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 30, 1985

In the wake of toxic contamination of the
groundwater, disturbing patterns of infant
birth defects and miscarriage have surfaced,
fueling a demand for independent studies of
the environmental impact of toxics leaked
by the electronics industry.

Since many chemicals used in the indus-
try are known or suspected carcinogens,
mutagens (genetic hazard), and teratogens
(reproductive hazard), cancer and birth
defect registries are now proposed to track
the effects of exposure.

Recently the industry tried to tinker with
figures which might prove embarassing or
provide alarming evidence that all is not
“clean” in this “clean industry”

The powerful Semiconductor Industry
Association, headquartered in the Silicon
Valley, enlisted the chairman of the Repub-
lic National Committee in efforts to influ-
ence an Environmental Protection Agency
study of the Silicon Valley’s environment.

The EPA is expected to release a portion
of the report of its Integrated Environmental
Management Project in September, dealing
with forecasts of cancer and other health
risks created by exposure to air, soil and
water contamination.

The ISA chose to end-run the normal
procedures for expressing its views. They
sought top-level influence to force EPA to
drop its report projects — which presuma-
bly do not show the industry in a kindly
light.

The SIA may have been encouraged to
pull political strings after witnessing how
the Reagan administration has successfully
sabotaged the work of the Equal Employ-
ment Opportunity Commission and the
National Labor Relations Board.

Cuts in pay and workforce, plant clos-
ings, short weeks and layoffs have plagued
most of the electronics industry over the last
year. These have blown big holes in. the
notion that high tech will protect communi-
ties and workers from the job insecurity of
other industries.

_ Today it is clear that high tech is not
immune to the periodic cyclical and structu-
ral crises which afflict capitalism generally.

In the Silicon Valley, for the first time in
more than a decade, employment in the
industry has actually declined after months

of relatively flat growth. Production
workers — mostly women and minorities
— have borne the brunt of the cuts, but
more highly skilled technical and engineer-
ing workers have also been axed.

’ The unemployment rate rose by nearly 23
per cent — the biggest month-to-month
increase in eight years — between May and
June of this year, to 5.9 per cent. A loss of
1,200 jobs in May made it the sixth consecu-
tive month of job losses.

In June, 2,100 more electronics jobs dis-
appeared, dropping the Valley’s electronics
industry employment to 200,300. That is
600 fewer than one year earlier. Some 1,800
workers in services closely tied to electronics
work also lost their jobs. Since January,
5,500 computer and semiconductor indus-
try workers have been sacked in Santa
Clara county.

One-fourth of the Valley workforce is
employed in electronics. Continuing cut-
backs and job losses spell a growing disaster
for families, many of whom have two and
three wage earners in the industry, often at
the same company. Cuts have an explosive
effect when the entire family income is at
stake.

Not everyone suffers equally, however.
Engineers and management, who make up
about one-third of the high tech workforce
here, earn two or three times as much as the
average production worker.

Their salaries, made even more generous
by a smorgasbord of fringe benefits, have
given metropolitan San Jose the fifth-
highest level of community buying power in
the nation. Median household disposable
(after tax) income here jumped 11.8 per cent
Over a year earlier, to $37,776. The U.S.
average is $25,496.

Electronics engineers who lose their jobs
generally find a new one more quickly than
their production worker counterparts, who
may pound the pavement for months, and
often exhaust their unemployment benefits
before work becomes available. Many end

up taking minimum wage jobs as maids,
nursing aides, restaurant help, or gardeners
‘to keep food on their tabs.

With one of the highest-cost housing
markets in the nation, the Silicon Valley is
no place to be without an income. Many
families pay as much as 60 per cent of their
income on housing, double the 30 per cent
recommended by financial advisors.

Despite the economic slump, housing

.,Prices have not dropped. The mediam price
for a house in San Jose reached a record
$131,000 in July, a 9.2 increase in juSt six
months.

Layoffs have created a large pool of
“itinerant” or ‘“‘disposable” workers. Unable
to find a permenant electronics job, they are
drive into the arms of temporary work
agencies, which abound here.

Increasingly, companies -are slashing
their permanent workforces in favor of hir-
ing temporaries who are paid less, do not
get fringe benefits, accumulate no seniority,
and can be laid off whenever economic
conditions or company policies dictate.

Some companies which boast of their
no-layoff policies quietly hire, then later fire,
temporary workers, while continuing to
boast that none of “their” workers have
been laid off.

But life is not so rosy even for the “per-
manent” workers who supposedly enjoy the
benefits of this policy. They are under grow-
ing pressure for greater production, often
accompanied by wage cuts or wage freezes
to insulate the corporate bottom line. The
message is clear: toe the line or be replaced
by a temporary.

Many fall victim to arbitrary enforce-
ment of company rules and discrimination
by supervisors. They are fired for ‘‘cause”
after accumulating a series of disciplinary
warnings for infractions which are either
fabricated or were previously ignored by
management.

These hapless workers may then be
unable to collect unemployment compensa-
tion when the company claims they were
fired for misconduct. In fact, they were part
of a company-wide plan:to reduce the’ size
of the. workforce without resorting to a
layoff.

Employment instability in the electronics
industry is not limited to periods of eco-
nomic slump, like the present one. It is
woven into the very fabric of high tech.
Figures compiled at the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, reveal that the average life
span of a high tech facility is about six to
seven years — compared to the 13-year life
of the typical manufacturing facility.

Even in the best of times, high tech com-
panies suffer from above-average business
failures, plant closing, capital migration and
other maladies generally associated with the
Mid-west’s smokestack industries.

And this boom industry, once heralded
by some as “recession-proof,” has suffered
from two back-to-back economic slumps
since the start of the decade. An end to the
present crunch is not expected until next
year at the earliest.

Electronics workers, their communities
and other communities across the nation
which have been seeking high tech devel-
opment have ample cause for reappraisal.

Workers will increasingly have to con-
front the challenge to organize unions —
the only meaningful way to obtain some
influence over policies that affect their
working conditions, economic surival, and
job security.

High tech communities will be forced to
reassess programs and policies that. have
given the industry a blank cheque or turned a
blind eye to corporate transgressions. Stric-
ter monitoring, regulation, and intervention
in industry practices are needed to protect
the environment, community health and
economic vitality.

Competing communities ought to take a
good second look at the programs created
to induce high tech development. They need
to ask, “At what price?” before opening
their local treasuries, abandoning environ-
mental and safety regulations and enforce-
ment, distorting rational zoning, or other-
wise ignoring reality to compete for the
promise of gold at the end of the high tech
rainbow. — World Magazine

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