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SILICON VALLEY BUSINESS INK 2003

“The workers united, we’ll never be defeated,” chanted a charged-up crowd of 50 protesters picketing the Offshore Outsourcing Conference this week at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport.

“Shame, shame, shame, shame,” they shouted at conference attendees, including Silicon Valley’s largest employer, Hewlett-Packard Co. of Palo Alto.

“Hey HP, invent jobs” read their signs, as passing cars honked in solidarity.

Enough workers showed up along busy Bayshore Highway to convince union organizer Joshua Sperry that Silicon Valley’s first “open source” union for all tech workers will defy history and take root in the nation’s tech mecca.

Lately, Sperry has been fielding calls from all types of tech workers, fearful their jobs are in jeopardy as valley companies race to outsource more jobs overseas. But Sperry can’t do much to help, unless they work for one of the few companies he represents as an organizer for the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 9423 and the IBM workers’ union, Alliance@IBM.

An open-source union, however, would work on behalf of any tech worker in Silicon Valley through legislative advocacy and proactive efforts to help erode lost jobs to offshoring. This type of union has no bargaining rights with employers, nor can it protect striking workers from employer penalties, but it would be a major step forward in organizing an otherwise non-union work force, Sperry says.

An open union does not resemble commonly known unions like the Teamsters, but rather falls somewhere in between a government sanctioned union and a lobbying group. Members would have some benefits of traditional unionism, such as workers’ rights advocacy in the form of organized protests, advice and support regarding legal rights, bargaining over wages and working conditions if feasible, protection of pension holdings and political representation.

So far about 20 people have signed up for a workers’ rights advocacy group, called TechsUniteSV, which kicked off its first meeting at this week’s offshoring protest.

“We’ve got to come out and be vocal as an industry,” says Cary Snyder, a former hardware engineer and semiconductor analyst who blames his inability to find work in the valley to offshore outsourcing. Sperry and Snyder hope TechsUniteSV will lay the foundation for the first open union here.

If the valley is ever going to unionize, now seems the moment. Fear and lack of job security permeates the region as offshoring becomes a mainstream business strategy. Offshoring—sending jobs to third-party contractors or
building new facilities overseas—is not new to the tech industry but is gathering considerable momentum among valley companies, experts agree.

By the end of 2004, one out of 10 jobs in U.S. information technology companies will move offshore, according to market researcher Gartner Inc. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, Silicon Valley lost
43,300 jobs between July 2002 and July 2003, with unemployment conservatively estimated at 9 percent.

Just how many lost jobs have left the valley to offshoring is unknown.

Thousands of regional workers this year contacted the only other open tech union in the country, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, says its president Marcus Courtney. Known as WashTech and TechsUnite, the Seattle-based organization is a model for Sperry in Silicon Valley.

But organizing this town won’t be easy.

The biggest obstacle is accessing employees in the valley’s large companies, says WashTech’s Courtney.

“A lot of people are scared to speak out,” says a local IBM employee who asked not to be named. “They think they may be the next target for layoffs.”

The IBM worker took vacation time to attend this week’s protest.

That is especially true for workers that already have seen mass job losses at their companies, says Katie Quan, chair of the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education at the Institute of
Industrial Relations.

Another barricade is the region’s vocational history and reputation.

Though illegal, employer intimidation on the shop floor is likely the top reason unions don’t stick in Silicon Valley, Quan says.

Former valley activist Michael Eisenscher knows this all too well. He was a local organizer back in the late ‘70s for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America., which tried to unionize workers from Santa Clara
chip-makers Intel Corp. and National Semiconductor Corp.

The union was chased out of the valley by employer anti-union campaigns, says Eisenscher and others.

“The entire industry ... coordinated their anti-union effort,” Eisenscher says.

Intel spokeswoman Tracy Koon offered no explanation for why its workers didn’t organize decades ago, except to point out that employees “overwhelmingly voted against” it. Koon says if a union formed today, Intel would comply with its legal responsibilities.

Legally, employers can’t block unions, says employment and labor attorney, Paul Mello, a senior associate in the Silicon Valley office of Pillsbury Winthrop LLP.

But employers can remind workers that by joining a union they lose the ability to negotiate employment contracts one-on-one, which Menlo says deters many Silicon Valley workers from organizing.

After all, the valley’s success is rooted in its egalitarian workaday world, where workers owned shares in companies and got promoted based on talent alone.

“We feel É our skills should be in such demand that we shouldn’t need a union,” says a programmer interested in unionizing, who took vacation time to attend the protest.

Aside from its John Wayne culture, valley workers have anti-union concerns of their own.

Tim Strenk has worked in the valley for the past 15 years and while he supports unions in general, he doesn’t think they’ll help Silicon Valley workers. Strenk points out that the bulk of jobs available today are with
startups. He says that while many startups do some offshoring, if the valley became unionized, more jobs would be sent overseas.

“I’m afraid that instead of hiring a small percent in the valley, they’d hire even less,” says Strenk, an engineering manager with a local startup.

Still, among the thousands contacting WashTech and CWA for help are workers from startups to heavyweights, including Intel and HP, which refused to discuss the prospect of unions in the valley.

Many doubt whether unions would stick here, but it seems there is momentum enough to organize.

“Silicon Valley workers are too smart to join a union?” Sperry muses. “I don’t buy it.”