NY TIMES September 26, 1999
GRASS-ROOTS BUSINESS
Unions See a Fertile Field at Lower End of High Tech
By JOEL KOTKIN
S AN JOSE , Calif.In a valley that celebrates its bumper crop of
winners, you might count people like Julian Cornejo as among the
losers. Cornejo, 55, a technician in computer-aided design, has
spent the last 15 years working as a kind of high-tech gypsy for
various temporary agencies, a situation that now leaves him nearly
broke and on the brink of homelessness.
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Mark Richards for The New York Times
Julian Cornejo, an unemployed technician in computer-aided design,
supports plans to organize Silicon Valley's contingent workers.
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"Temporary workers have become a hidden subculture here," Cornejo
said. "You don't enjoy the stock options or the holidays. When
you're laid off, you just bite the bullet. You don't get much
respect."
Cornejo's experience as a temp, which included a financially
ruinous dispute with an employment agency over a workers'
compensation claim, has led him to support a new effort to organize
contingent workers throughout Silicon Valley. And the travails of
workers like him offer what union organizers see as a unique
opportunity to improve on the negligible headway they have made
among technology workers at established companies.
The drive to organize the valley's huge army of temporary workers
also reflects growing concern about the widening gaps between
differing classes of workers in the high-tech economy of the late
1990's. Research from both ends of the labor-management spectrum
shows that while top executives' compensation has been soaring
throughout the decade, the real wages of lower-end workers have
been stagnant or dropping, even in the pulsing heart of the
technology boom.
"There's a myth that everyone is rich and that poverty is just a
transitional problem," said Bob Brownstein, policy director for
Working Partnerships, a labor-backed group that has studied the
valley economy. "That is something that is simply not true."
Brownstein and several academic experts trace much of widening
class chasm to a shift by high-technology companies to hiring
temporary workers. Since the mid-1980's, employment in temporary
agencies in the valley has risen at twice the overall job growth
rate and now accounts for 27 to 40 percent of the total work force,
according to Chris Benner, a researcher for Working Partnerships.
Wages for part-time workers -- mainly clerks, electronics assembly
workers and technicians -- have generally lagged behind those of
full-time employees.
Greater reliance on temps is a trend in many sectors of the
economy, but according to Brownstein, it represents an especially
stark shift in culture in the technology industry, where the role
models used to be giants like Intel and Hewlett-Packard that prided
themselves on generous, almost paternalistic employment policies. A
new wave of companies, he said, reject such practices and instead
use temporary or contract labor to maintain flexibility while
restricting their permanent staff to a small number of core
employees.
Many of the valley's temps, like Cornejo, have trade-school-taught
computer and technology skills that once might have spared them
from the kinds of indignities more usually associated with garment
sweatshops or farm fields. No longer, said Erica Rios, a union
organizer. Unlike the young programmers and engineers who work
crushing hours but can hope to join in windfall profits through
stock options and other incentives, "these workers do not feel they
are part of the high-tech industry," she observed. "They play an
important role but feel totally unappreciated."
Their disaffection is the starting point for organizing efforts
like Working Partnership's Temporary Workers Project. The project
includes setting up a temporary-workers' association, drafting a
new model code of conduct for employers and establishing a new
temporary agency called Together at Work. Ms. Rios said the effort
sprang from workers' complaints that the workers' compensation and
health benefits offered by for-profit temporary agencies are
inadequate and that the agencies make it difficult for workers to
avail themselves of their benefits.
Cornejo said he filed a workers' compensation claim in February
1998 after experiencing a shoulder injury on the job at a local
semiconductor company, but received nothing until October, because
of what he called foot-dragging by the agency that had placed him;
the injury left him far behind on his bills. "The agencies don't
want to press a claim that may cost a company something," he said.
"They don't want to bite the hand that feeds them."
The unions may see an opportunity, but industry officials doubt
that labor will have any more luck organizing contingent workers
than they have had with full-timers. Carl Guardino, president of
the Silicon Valley Manufacturers Association, said unions simply do
not fit well into what he sees as the region's highly collaborative
culture.
"I think the reason that Silicon Valley has functioned so well for
so long -- and so many boats have risen -- is that there is not so
much of this 'us versus them' that is associated with many of the
unions," Guardino said. "I can appreciate that they are looking at
this sector. But will they be effective in Silicon Valley? I don't
think so."
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Are temporary workers a booming area's proletariat?
_________________________________________________________________
So far, the evidence backs him up. The organizing effort has not
succeeded in changing policies at major temporary agencies, and
after nine months in existence, Together at Work has placed only 100
people. Yet both Ms. Rios and Christine Macias, who runs the
temporary agency, see their efforts as just the beginning of a
breakthrough for unions in an industry unfriendly to their efforts.
For one thing, the issue of contract workers and their treatment in
the workplace has attracted media attention, including articles in
The San Jose Mercury News, and a California State Senate committee
plans hearings on the subject. Brownstein says that the valley's
image as the home of a new democratic capitalism is beginning to
wear thin, and that both workers and employers are coming around to
the idea that new standards for temporary labor are needed.
"There are more and more people, even in industry, who fear that
the gap between the rich and poor is becoming the biggest threat to
the security of the valley," Brownstein said. "You don't have to be
a Cassandra or a radical to know something needs to change. That's
the discussion we're trying to start."
Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for
Public Policy. His column on the Main Street economy appears the
fourth Sunday of each month. E-mail: grassrts at nytimes.com
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