Silicon Valley is filled with secrets, and Karen Hossfeld plans to reveal one of its dirtiest. A San Francisco State University sociologist, Hossfeld has focused her attention on the forgotten workforce that turns high-tech dreams into palpable realities - a group described by the title of her upcoming book: Small, Foreign, and Female.
That title was inspired by an interview with a manager of a small contract assembly firm who explained why so many assembly workers are either Asian or Latina women. "There are just three things I look for in entry-level hiring," Hossfeld recalls the manager saying. "Small, foreign, and female. You just do that right and everything else takes care of itself."
Over the course of more than a decade, Hossfeld interviewed 200 immigrants working in entry-level manufacturing jobs in Silicon Valley. She heard countless stories of sexual harassment, poor working conditions, and threats of deportation, even to those here legally. Most of the women keep quiet for fear of losing their jobs. And the employers like it that way, Hossfeld says. "There's a definite racial/gender pecking order in hiring. There's an assumption that immigrant women, especially Asian women, will be submissive employees."
Another covert way to control this workforce is to bar the organizing of unions. "Many employers hire big union-busting firms when there's a spark of interest in forming a union," Hossfeld says.
But the dirtiest secret Hossfeld uncovered could have deadly consequences. According to Hossfeld, many of these women are unaware they are being exposed to toxic chemicals on the job. "New chemicals are thrown into the manufacturing process without adequate testing," Hossfeld says.
Rumors of toxic chemical use became so widespread that IBM commissioned its own study designed to quell them. That study, completed this June, found the opposite to be true: Women who worked with a substance called ethylene glycol ether experienced an unusually high rate of miscarriage. IBM will eliminate use of the substance by the end of 1994.
Hossfeld hopes her book (due next year from the University of California Press) will bring overdue attention to those who labor in Silicon Valley's trenches. "You know, Silicon Valley is famed for its boy-wonder millionaires, but for every one of those people there are a couple dozen others making minimum wage and working in pitiful conditions."
ELECTRIC WORD
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