After 27 years, the National Labor Relations Board has overturned a rule that said workers employed through a temporary agency could not join the union representing other employees at their workplace. The change is of great interest in Silicon Valley, where temp employees are the rule in some parts of the high-tech industry -- parts the unions have tended to overlook. PNS correspondent Raj Jayadev is the Silicon Valley/Digital Divide editor for YO! Youth Outlook, a monthly newspaper by and about Bay Area youth published by Pacific News Service.

A landmark National Relations Labor Board ruling that makes it easier for temporary workers to join unions could shake up Silicon Valley -- if organized labor can seize the opportunity. So far, unions have barely noticed the workers affected by the NLRB move.

Under the new ruling, temp workers at a business can join the union representing the company's permanent employees without prior consent from the employment agency which actually employs the temps. This breaks a precedent set 27 years ago.

The ruling carries particular weight in Silicon Valley, because the "high-tech" industry employs more temporary workers than almost any other sector of the economy.

Nancy Shiffer, of the AFL-CIO legal department, says the NLRB ruling "opens the doors for temps to have the same protections as regular employees. Before, as a practical matter, they couldn't organize under federal labor law."

William Goulde, former head of the NRLB, also sees the ruling as "a great opportunity to organize temps." He says accounts that claim the ruling will have only limited effect are incorrect. "It has complete applicability, even at places without a pre-existing union."

In Silicon Valley, an estimated 32,000 people in a workforce of 800,0000 are employed through temp agencies.

With 250 temp agencies in Santa Clara County alone (the center of Silicon Valley), the rate of temporary employment is three times the national average. Organized labor, on the other hand, has witnessed a steady decline, with only 10 percent of the labor force in the Valley belonging to unions.

In the electronics industry, low-wage blue-collar workers are among the most likely to work through temp agencies and the least likely to belong to a union. The approximately 7,000 "electronic assemblers" in Santa Clara County work mostly in low-wage production line jobs that involve manufacture and assembly of standard computer parts.

Most are hired through temp agencies which offer no health benefits or job security and offer an average pay of $7.00 an hour.

Since routine assembly and manufacturing are not commonly thought of as part of the digital workforce, these workers have been excluded from discussions of organizing in the "new economy." Indeed, there is so little awareness of low-wage temporary workers that their exact number is unknown.

"That's the number we are all looking for," said Van Harris, policy director at the South Bay Labor Council, a coalition of over 110 unions in the Valley. He blames the high level of job-shifting in the industry.

But Ruben Barrelas, head of Joint Ventures, a leading research firm, says, "Nobody categorizes jobs like that in the Valley. If it was a sexy kind of topic -- like the number of dot-coms -- people would know."

The NLRB ruling itself came as a result of unions' efforts to stay alive in the flexible new economy -- efforts directed mostly at office and highly trained employees.

For example, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) now represents "perm-a-temp" programmers at Microsoft and Amazon.com in the state of Washington. It is trying to organize IBM office employees as well. In the Silicon Valley, organized labor has put tremendous resources and energy into gaining influence in the white collar side of the computer industry.

Here the CWA has launched a "Network Professionals" training project which gives participants -- all trained professionals -- networking certification from Cisco Systems at a heavily discounted price if they join the union. The program offers job placement at major Valley companies upon completion.

Going even further, the South Bay Labor Council, among the country's most vocal advocates for temporary workers, has set up its own nonprofit temporary agency called Solutions at Work, which offers union wages and a portable benefits program.

However, this program, too, focuses mainly on office and clerical employees rather than manufacturing and "low-skilled" assembly workers -- again, because they are not seen as part of the new high-tech economy.

The distance between organized labor and the Valley's hidden workforce is longstanding. Indeed, no union has held a significant presence in the blue-collar side of high-tech for the last 20 years. Lost somewhere between the old and the new economies, this unseen workforce has consistently been brushed aside by organized labor.

The Labor Council's Harris says this is changing. "We are trying to start to go after some light-assembly in our temp program, we're about 80/20 (office vs. assembly) participation now," he says. This sort of expansion could be the chance labor has been hoping for in the face of declining union participation.

Harris feels the organizing moment has come, now that the NLRB decision says temps can vote in certification elections and join unions.