Mexican Workers Invisable Part Of Silicon Valley Backbone
By Elizabeth Gonzales, Pacific News Service, April 18, 2001

The stereotypical image of the immigrant worker from Mexico is a hard-working field hand. But more and more, he (and more and more she) can be found behind closed doors in Silicon Valley's high-tech industry. With Mexico wanting to partner with high-tech, this means serious business on both sides of the border. PNS Contributor Elizabeth Gonzales is a writer and organizer for Silicon Valley De-Bug (www.siliconvalleydebug.org), a youth organization sponsored by Pacific News Service.

Immigrant workers from Mexico are still struggling to make a living, but today they face exploitation not only in the fields, but on assembly lines of high-tech corporations in Silicon Valley such as Hewlett-Packard.

This growing workforce remains invisible to most of the outside world. Unlike farmworkers, who toil under the sun for all to see, assembly workers are inside, behind closed doors.

Of course, in terms of numbers, there is no comparison. An estimated four million people in the United States are farmworkers and at least two-thirds are immigrants -- 80 percent from Mexico.

High-tech manufacturing employs 97,000 people in Santa Clara County. Its entry-level labor force is drawn largely from Silicon Valley's huge immigrant pool. Most assembly line workers are Mexican and Vietnamese, the majority of those women.

As the daughter of immigrants who began working in the fields and later moved into assembly work, I have seen a pattern of exploitation.
That pattern is now well on its way into Mexico and will no doubt continue to grow under Mexican President Vicente Fox, who is pushing to expand the country's economy by increasing high-tech industry and becoming an essential Silicon Valley partner.

Assembly work pays an average of $9 an hour. No union represents the workers, who are usually hired under contract through one of the 250 temporary agencies in the area.

High-tech companies use contract workers to increase profits because they do not have to pay benefits that come with permanent employment.

More than 82,000 chemicals are used in the high-tech industry every day. Less than 2 percent of these are regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Agency. Cancer, diabetes, and miscarriages have all been linked to this supposedly "clean" industry, which has an occupational illness rate three times that of any other U.S. manufacturing industry, according to studies by the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health.

As one of the workers making modems on the assembly line at the PemStar Company in San Jose, I often worked from before sunrise into the evening because of mandatory overtime. We stood in a fixed position for hours at a time with only short breaks.

Inside the factory, something irritating in the air caused us to blow our noses several times a day. We walked past a small sign -- placed at foot level -- warning of chemicals in use that have been linked to miscarriages and illnesses.

The invisibility of Mexican Americans in Silicon Valley has dangerous implications for workers in Mexico, where lack of regulation means conditions can only be worse. Already 15 major high-tech manufacturing companies -- including IBM, Flextronics, and Hewlett Packard -- have plants in Mexico, where high-tech accounts for close to a quarter of the country's manufacturing jobs, mainly in Guadalajara and the U.S.-Mexico border.

As high-tech industry grows in Mexico, I hope that workers in Silicon Valley and Mexico can fight to improve labor standards. High tech contract workers can learn from farmworkers. They must pull together and realize that their struggle is now an international one.

U.S. - Latin America: Economic Ties

• While Politicians Posture - World's Poor on the Move
  Pacific News Service, Sep 7
• New Players - New Game? Guest Workers Or Amnesty
  Pacific News Service, Aug 7
• Dollars For Fox, Votes For Bush - Two Reasons Why The "Amnesty" Word Won't Go Away
  Pacific News Service, July 25
• Killing In The Name Of Capital Gain Is Not A Capital Crime
  Pacific News Service, June 11
• Citigroup's Purchase of Mexico's Banamex Ends Socialist Legacy
  NCM Online, May 24
• Spanish-Language Instruction a Booming Industry in the U.S.
  NCM Online, May 17
• Mexico by the Numbers - Latin America's Powerhouse
  Pacific News Service, April 24

NCM: Latino
Pacific News: Money