by Silja J.A. Talvi
06.11.01

"IN THE OLD ECONOMY, the factors of production were plant and equipment. In the new one, it's what you know that counts," says John Doerr, a leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist in the opening moments of Secrets of Silicon Valley.

His spiel is an impassioned one—even a convincing one.

"The old economy was about security and monopolies and job preservation and wages. The new economy is about risk-taking and competition and job creation and it involves ownership and options for everyone in the enterprise...The old economy is standing still. The new one is moving ahead."

Moving ahead, indeed. But toward what?

That’s the question that Secrets of Silicon Valley producers and directors Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow set out to explore in their new documentary, released to sold-out audiences in the San Francisco Bay Area and the adjacent Silicon Valley in April.

The documentary is the first to offer a piercing look at the day-to-day lives of the workers—the cogs, if you will—that keep the gears of the well-oiled Silicon Valley profit-making machine moving at breakneck speed.

But this is not a film about the lives of wealthy 20-something dot-commers or even their pink-slipped counterparts.

"Being in the Bay Area, there’s just been a siege of hype that Silicon Valley technology is going to solve all of our problems: If you’re smart enough and work hard, you can become a billionaire," explains Snitow, who was a producer at the Fox-affiliated KTVU-TV News in the Bay Area for 16 years, and along with Kaufman, producer/director of the 1997 documentary Blacks and Jews. "We wanted to make a film where issues of class were central, to look at where things are denied in American culture."

Instead, Secrets of Silicon Valley offers a valuable glimpse into the world that operates below the radar of media and consumer attention: the legions of low-paid, uninsured, temp workers who form the industrial core of Silicon Valley, assembling everything from printers to motherboards to software packages.

Kaufman and Snitow uncover a largely unseen and unheard workforce predominantly made up of people of color, putting in long, monotonous, often hazardous and unsafe working days in large Silicon Valley warehouses and factories.

"I was one of the many people that had no conception that this existed so close to my home," says Kaufman, who was the founding director of the influential San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. "I really thought that this kind of manufacturing happened in Asia and across the border, and generally outside the U.S. ... for me, it was a total surprise."

Even the very existence of those factories is, to this day, denied by high-tech giants like Hewlett-Packard, who relegate over hiring responsibilities for such operations to Manpower, the world’s largest temporary agency. In doing so, companies like HP appear to have turned a strategic blind eye to the struggles of the temp workers for fair pay, better and safer working conditions, and collective organizing rights.

"This is really a kind of marshaling of a workforce—an industrial workforce in the U.S.—without rights, without benefits, working in fear, completely dependent, being called to work at any time," says Snitow. "It’s a transformation of the post-New Deal world back to the world of the sweatshops at the turn of the century."

Secrets of Silicon Valley turns its attention to two, key figures: Magda Escobar, the Executive Director of Plugged In, a non-profit working with low-income communities of color in East Palo Alto on technology access training; and Raj Jayadev, a young temp worker who begins to agitate for changes in the HP printer-assembly factory when he discovers that he and his co-workers are suffering from notably similar ailments, including nagging coughs, nosebleeds, asthma and respiratory infections.

Shot to videotape over the course of three years (and on a relatively small budget of $300,000), Secrets of Silicon Valley follows a non-traditional documentary route by letting the interviewees determine the discourse of the film. More than 200 people were interviewed, the filmmakers explain, including numerous wealthy entrepreneurs, CEOs and high-paid consultants whose comments are among the most illuminating and thought-provoking in the entire film.

The filmmakers did not provide any narration, Snitow says, with the intent of "disorienting the audience enough" so that they would be afforded the opportunity to think critically about the material in front of them—and the "hype" of Silicon Valley—on their own.

"We wanted to create a situation in which the people who are viewing the film have do so without a guide and try to make sense of it, and in doing so have to rearrange some of the categories that exist in their minds," Snitow explains.

One of those "categories" is the notion that the high-tech industry has brought enlightened automation to assembly; subtly, many consumers of computer-related products have been led to believe that the mind-numbing assembly lines of yesteryear have no place in the creative, independent New Economy.

But the assembly lines are there. And the work, absent of stringent labor standards and collective organizing, is not only grossly underpaid, but precarious as a source of steady income. In the absence of job security, temporary workers must simply hope for the best, trying to appease the demands of their employers with little or no input, no role in the workplace outside of their dictated assignments on the assembly line.

Most of the workers are women. Many are also immigrants who fear deportation and so avoid speaking up for their own rights, as evidenced by the one interview with a Mexican immigrant worker who endured the daily onslaught of screaming employers ordering around their workers.

Finally, after a back injury, he spoke up against the management. "I had to say what I was feeling ," says the worker, Fernando Gomez-Dimas, in the film. "What I feel is we are all human. I believe we are all God’s children."

At Alom Technologies, a Silicon Valley company, more than a million software packages are shipped every month. "It takes a lot of hands," enthuses Hannah Kain to the filmmakers in her Alom office, explaining that her workers start at $6.50/hour . "This is really where the rubber meets the road. We are the engine behind the Internet ... [My] main inspiration is the idea of perfection. You work based on zero-tolerance."

And at the HP plant, Jayadev indicates that some 900 workers—all of whom are temporaries—make roughly $8.00 /hour, although many workers have been there for four or five years. "People can’t afford the valley that they’re creating," he says.

"There’s an idea of enlightenment that’s tied to the new economy; that the backward labor standards may be in the past. but ... if people weren't doing the manual labor, how would you have the new economy? You need labor that’s inexpensive," explains Jayadev in Secrets of Silicon Valley. "The temp economy is extremely secretive, that’s built into it’s characteristic. It has to be hidden. These exploits have to be hidden because it would completely burst the bubble of all boats floating, of the affluence for everybody."

For those who can afford Silicon Valley, the daily lives of the contingent workforce are of little concern, say Snitow and Kaufman. One in nine residents of Santa Clara County in Silicon Valley, for instance, is already a millionaire. In the meantime, 95% of temp workers under the age of 30 do not receive employee health insurance, and are the first to be fired when pink slips are handed out.

Exactly how many temps have been fired since the downward spiral of the dot-com craze began last year is unknown; those figures are not officially recorded. We do know that nearly 65,000 dot-com job cuts have been announced this year, in the previous five months alone. With that many full-fledged, permanent high-tech workers losing their jobs, the number of displaced temps could easily be double that amount.

There's one more thing worth considering about Silicon Valley's "secret" of low-paid, assembly line workers. Before the Silicon Rush invaded the Greater San Jose/San Francisco area, orchards and farms were once dotted across the picturesque landscape.

"Historically, the plight of the temporary farmworkers brought in to pick produce and work the land was largely ignored," Kaufman says. "They used to not consider the people who brought you your produce, and now people are now not considering the people who bring you your high-tech."

Things change. And things stay the same. The New Economy is moving ahead—betting on the fact that temp workers, for their part, will be content standing still.