The Silicon Valley of Dreams

Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy

David N. Pellow, Lisa Sun-Hee Park

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814768174
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia urbana

Next to the nuclear industry, the largest producer of contaminants in the air, land, and water is the electronics industry. Silicon Valley hosts the highest density of Superfund sites anywhere in the nation and leads the country in the number of temporary workers per capita and in workforce gender inequities. Silicon Valley offers a sobering illustration of environmental inequality and other problems that are increasingly linked to the globalization of the world's economies.

In The Silicon Valley of Dreams, the authors take a hard look at the high-tech region of Silicon Valley to examine environmental racism within the context of immigrant patterns, labor markets, and the historical patterns of colonialism. One cannot understand Silicon Valley or the high-tech global economy in general, they contend, without also understanding the role people of color play in the labor force, working in the electronic industry's toxic environments. These toxic work environments produce chemical pollution that, in turn, disrupts the ecosystems of surrounding communities inhabited by people of color and immigrants. The authors trace the origins of this exploitation and provide a new understanding of the present-day struggles for occupational health and safety.

The Silicon Valley of Dreams will be critical reading for students and scholars in ethnic studies, immigration, urban studies, gender studies, social movements, and the environment, as well as activists and policy-makers working to address the needs of workers, communities, and industry.

1
Introduction

In the public consciousness, high tech is the antithesis of that old-fashioned, fossil fuel–driven industry. The news media normally discuss the new technologies as digitally clean, trafficking in information rather than goods, thriving on creativity rather than muscle. But that’s a mirage.

—Christopher Cook and Clay Thompson, “Silicon Hell”

We begin with two images. The first is of a place that has been variously referred to as “The Valley of Dreams,” “The Valley of the Heart’s Delight,” “The Garden of America,” “The Garden City,” “The Garden of the World,” and “The Fruit Bowl of America.”¹ Located mainly in Santa Clara County, California, Silicon Valley is widely hailed as the epicenter of the Information Age, the birthplace of the Digital Age, the foundation of the “new high-tech economy,” and a place where people are creating, living, and enjoying the American Dream.² Vast fortunes are accumulated every business day in a region political leaders proudly boast is home to the largest proportion of millionaires anywhere in the world. Legends abound of “[T]hirty-year-old tycoons in T-shirts, making their first hundred million before they buy their first pinstripe suit; secretaries worth millions thanks to a few dollars spent on stock options; garage inventors suddenly finding themselves on lists of the world’s richest men.”³ Immigrants from all over the world have traveled to the Valley where some have achieved unprecedented wealth by working in the high-tech industry. They have come to “experience the magic of this new engine powering the global village,”⁴ the electronics sector, the world’s largest and fastest growing industry. Silicon Valley is where “start-up wishes and IPO (initial public offerings) dreams set imaginations on fire.… There are waiting lists for luxury cars and bidding wars for palatial estates.”⁵ Its economy California’s new Gold Rush, Silicon Valley is a place where entrepreneurs celebrate “the days of miracle and wonder … [where] good times have arrived in abundance.”⁶ Like the first Gold Rush, all one needs in Silicon Valley is passion, commitment to hard work, and a little luck and imagination. “What a wildly democratic notion. On the Internet, anyone has a shot at success.”⁷ David Kratz, director of a public relations firm that does much of its business with the Valley’s Internet companies, explains that in Silicon Valley, “For great ideas, there are no barriers to entry.”⁸ Silicon Valley is an equal-opportunity, “idea-based economy” whose principal fuel is the human imagination and ingenuity. And the payoff for many players is handsome. In 1998, the average wage in the Valley was around $50,000, while the national average was only around $31,000.⁹ Wage rates were about 60 percent above—and growing far more quickly than—the national average. Homes regularly sell for $1 million more than their multimillion-dollar asking prices, and, in 1999, the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church received more than 10 percent of its contributions in stock instead of money.¹⁰ Silicon Valley has been called “the Florence of the Information Age,”¹¹ where one can find “the best self-image of America.”¹² Birthplace of the computer chip and the first commercially successful personal computer, “the Valley leaped fully grown into public consciousness as the answer to America’s problems of a shrinking industrial base and growing unemployment.”¹³

But the Valley has an underside. A second image we will consider is of a place of considerable human suffering, preventable illness and premature death, the exploitation of thousands of workers, widespread ecological devastation, and increasing social inequality. Some workers labor in their homes using toxic chemicals, earning no more than a penny for each component they attach to electronics circuit boards that power the global economy. More and more employees are temporary, which means they earn less and less each year, have little say in how they do their jobs, and can be legally fired or replaced at a moment’s notice. Other workers are “downsized” and banned from the industry when they speak out about these deplorable conditions. If workers try to organize a union, they can find themselves humiliated, denounced, and fired as companies can neutralize opposition, downsize the workforce, or relocate to another state or country. Residents must be careful about the water they drink, the air they breathe, and the land they live on because all three are highly contaminated. Birth defects, cancer, respiratory ailments, and unexplained fatal illnesses are rife among workers and residents throughout the area. Those workers who own cars can look forward to numbingly long commutes along heavily polluted and congested interstates, to and from neighborhoods in which the housing costs are among the highest anywhere in the world.

Both of the above images accurately describe the same geographic space—Silicon Valley or Santa Clara Valley, California. The stark contrast between such enormous wealth, scientific innovation, and prosperity on one hand, and the relentless attacks on public and environmental health, the oppression and immiseration of thousands of workers and residents on the other, may be difficult for many of us to imagine or accept. But this is the reality of Silicon Valley. If we fail to look behind the “Silicon Curtain,”¹⁴ however, we only see the sheen, the sleek outer shell—an image created for mass consumption by public relations firms and the mainstream media.

These two sides of Silicon Valley are also a sobering illustration of environmental racism and environmental injustice, and of the many problems that are increasingly linked to the continued globalization of the world’s economies. Power, privilege, and wealth are relational, which often means that one person’s riches and leisure time are derived from another’s impoverishment and hard labor; one socioeconomic or racial/ethnic group’s access to safe, high-salary jobs and clean neighborhoods is frequently linked to another group’s relegation to dangerous, low-wage occupations and environmentally contaminated communities.¹⁵ This is the essence of environmental racism and environmental injustice: ecological policies and practices characterized by unfair treatment, discrimination, and oppression.

In this book we take a close look at the high-technology region of Silicon Valley, California, to understand how and why this economic juggernaut came into existence and to weigh its benefits against the social and environmental costs we pay as a result of investing in this major organ of the global economy. We conclude that, while high-tech production has provided many of us with unparalleled wealth and convenience, these benefits do not justify the extraordinary exploitation of human and natural resources that make them possible. Scholars, policy makers, and activists concerned with environmental racism have thus far paid inadequate attention to immigrants, women, toxic workplaces, and the consequences of the increasing transnational mobility of workers, pollution, and firms. We enrich the existing literature by providing a new understanding of the above dynamics, drawing from research on environmental racism and inequality, immigrant labor markets, and the social and environmental nature of the high-tech revolution.

Research on Environmental Racism and Injustice

Environmental racism and injustice, which systematically exclude poor persons, immigrants, people of color, and women from decisions affecting their communities, are scourges that have burdened people around the globe for centuries. Unequal protection against toxics is what many activists are fighting against. But what are they fighting for? Environmental justice (EJ) is achieved when people are living in socially just and ecologically sustainable communities. Such communities are characterized by “decent paying safe jobs; quality schools and recreation; decent housing and adequate health care; democratic decision-making and personal empowerment … where both cultural and biological diversity are respected and highly revered and where distributive justice prevails.”¹⁶

So while the terms environmental racism and environmental injustice denote the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on marginalized communities, environmental justice intends to improve the overall quality of life for those same populations. For at least three decades, activists have mobilized in hundreds of communities across the United States and around the globe to document and challenge these inequalities. This mobilization is generally referred to as the environmental justice (EJ) movement.

Since the early 1970s, a growing number of scholars, activists, and policy makers have become concerned with the distributive impacts of environmental pollution on different social classes and racial/ethnic groups.¹⁷ Hundreds of studies established a general pattern whereby environmental hazards are located in such a way that the poor and “people of color bear the brunt of the nation’s pollution problem.”¹⁸ Specific findings included a strong correlation between the location of toxic facilities and communities of color in all regions of the United States and consistent lack of enforcement by the USEPA against polluters in these same communities.¹⁹ Scientific findings such as these provided a catalyst for the EJ movement. Environmental racism became a common protest theme at the same time environmental justice (EJ) became a rallying vision.

Most EJ research has focused on the distribution of hazardous facilities in vulnerable communities and local responses to those practices (the EJ movement). Researchers are only now beginning to explore other areas of environmental justice concerns, including the workplace, housing, and transportation,²⁰ but the principal subject of study remains hazardous facility siting in communities of low-income people and people of color.²¹

What about the role of immigrants in EJ conflicts? Even though recent immigrants to the United States are among the country’s most socially vulnerable, politically powerless, and economically exploited populations, surprisingly little research addresses the links between immigrant communities—particularly immigrant workers—and environmental justice issues.

Immigration to what is now called the United States has proceeded almost continuously for several thousands of years. People generally immigrate for economic or political reasons (i.e., in search of jobs or as refugees or asylum seekers) or for purposes of family reunification. Asian and Latino immigrants in the United States are no different. Because the workers whose stories we tell in this book come from the Philippines, South Korea, Mexico, India, Vietnam, China, and Cambodia (among others), we present historical data and contemporary stories of people who immigrated for all of these reasons. Our justification for focusing on Asian and Latino immigrant populations is simple: they constitute the vast majority of recent immigrants in the United States, California, and Silicon Valley. While explicitly restricted or denied entry to the United States at various periods throughout history, these groups began arriving in great numbers after the passage of federal immigration legislation—the Hart-Celler Act—in 1965.²² By 1990 Asian Americans and Latinos made up approximately 12 percent of the U.S. population²³ and more than 84 percent of new immigrants.²⁴ This means that, in contrast to any other period in U.S. history, the majority of newcomers today are of non-European origin—they are people of color.²⁵

The social science research on immigrant labor has underscored the political and economic vulnerability of working-class immigrant populations (regardless of whether they are legal residents or undocumented persons).²⁶ The political vulnerability of working-class immigrants stems from both recent and historic legislation that restricts immigrant access to basic services (including health care and General Assistance) and to a number of legal protections.²⁷ This legislation has chipped away at the legal status of millions of immigrants and has threatened their life chances. This also means that the stability and future of entire immigrant communities are threatened. One of the most extreme forms of economic vulnerability facing immigrants is the ongoing hyperexploitation of undocumented and documented persons by employers. Immigrants face daily harassment by management, routine violations of wage and hour laws, and an exile to the lower reaches of the labor market where the jobs are highly segregated by race/ethnicity, pay a low wage, are dangerous and unhealthy, and offer scant prospects for upward mobility.²⁸

Of course political and economic vulnerability frequently go hand in hand. For example, when the State of California and the U.S. Congress passed legislation restricting immigrants’ rights to many social services and legal protections, these populations became more vulnerable, encouraging employers to exploit them even further.²⁹ The same process occurred when Congress passed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, after which the risks and penalties facing undocumented immigrant workers increased, allowing firms to pay them even less.³⁰ This unforgiving political and economic landscape is particularly frightening for immigrant women workers, who earn less than their male counterparts yet may be the principal caretakers of children and elderly family members.

These dynamics reveal a major contradiction in U.S. policy toward working-class immigrants: the political establishment despises immigrants and immigration, even though the reality is that immigrant labor is a core component of the U.S. economy.³¹ As legal advocate Julie Su puts it, “Immigrant workers … provide much of the base on which the U.S. economy thrives. Unfortunately, they share in little of the profits or commodities they make possible.”³² To Su’s observation we would add that immigrants also share in very little of the social and political benefits that accompany citizenship, such as the right to vote or to hold political office. Another observer writes, “[t]hat legal immigrants end up with reduced social rights compared to citizens, even though they pay regular taxes, is highly problematic for a liberal democracy.”³³ This is the major contradiction with regard to immigrant workers that we, as a nation, must face in the twenty-first century.

Our Contributions

Examining the literatures on environmental racism and immigrant labor, we find several issues that need to be addressed. First, neither body of scholarship seriously addresses the relationship between immigrants and environmental justice concerns. The few exceptions include studies or reports by Gottlieb, Hunter, Hurley, and Perfecto and Velasquez.³⁴ Perfecto and Velasquez were among the first researchers to re...