ABSTRACT
In November 1998, over 6,300 workers from fourteen production units of a $1 billion Indian multinational company went on an indefinite strike in Bangalore, the ‘Silicon Valley of India’. About 80 per cent of these striking workers were women between the ages of 18 and 25. Four years later, on the 1 May 2002, migrant women workers in Silicon Valley proudly displayed their intent to fight collectively for their rights through a colourful, multi-ethnic musicalplay. These women were graduates of a political education programme run by a small, community-based organization that focuses on health and safety in the workplace. In this chapter, I contextualize these inspiring incidents in the bigger picture of labour organization in the context of globalization. Specifically, I discuss the ways in which social organizations seeking to bring together a flexible, geographically dispersed workforce have mobilized workers’ multiple identities and transcended the artificial boundaries between work and home, between factories, and between ethnic groups that corporations use to divide workers. The innovative methods used to organize workers described here were
developed in response to the problems specific to the high-technology manufacturing industry, which is a major employer of women worldwide. Two key features of the industry need to be highlighted as they contextualize the findings that follow. First, electronics production is notoriously fragmented along complex globally-integrated production networks orchestrated by two types of multinationals – name-brand manufacturers such as Dell and Fujitsu, which are also known as Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), and contract manufacturers such as Flextronics and Jabil, which do not have name recognition among consumers. Numerous problems associated with this extended form of corporate structure have been identified by practitioners and scholars in relation to other industries, most notably garments (cf. Bonacich 2001; Ross 1997). In brief, subcontracting networks divide workers geographically and organizationally, as workers producing parts of the final name-brand product work in different parts of the world and for different direct employers. Not only does this diffuse employer responsibility but it also
undermines any potential collective consciousness among workers. Subcontracting also makes the workers in small units or home-based production invisible and harder to contact. Second, contrary to the popular image of high-technology as a clean
industry with pleasant campus-style facilities, ‘clean rooms’, where chips are manufactured in tightly controlled environments, and where workers wear white lab coats, electronics manufacturing is an extremely dangerous industry. The risk of toxic exposure is high throughout the entire electronics production chain – from the mining of raw materials to the manufacture of chemicals, the fabrication and assembly of components (namely, semiconductors and printed circuit boards), the handling of waste products and the disposal of damaged or post-consumption electronic equipment (Byster and Smith 1999; LaDou and Rohm 1998). In semiconductor chip production facilities, workers wear garments over street clothes that include booties, gloves, caps and sometimes, face masks, together called ‘bunny suits,’ but it is commonly believed that rather than protecting workers as they are presumably intended to, ‘bunny suits’ and masks in reality protect the quality of the chips by reducing human contact (Eisenscher 1993). Women workers are particularly susceptible to a range of acute and chronic forms of damage to their bodies due to the labour processes they are typically assigned in production and the daily high-pressure environment in which they work (Theobald 2002). The most common chronic ailments among electronics workers are headaches, dizziness, drowsiness, skin irritation and symptoms of damage to the liver and lungs (Foran 2001; Wangel 2001). Diseases such as testicular cancer, advanced uterine and cervical cancers and brain tumours have also been discovered among process engineers and other manufacturing workers at facilities in the US, Scotland and Taiwan, (Byster and Smith 1999; Chang et. al. 2001; Watterson and LaDou 2003). Careful consideration of the challenges posed to workers and labour orga-
nizations by globalization might suggest that the future of workers’ collective agency is simply not viable. Indeed, a common response to date has been a ‘sterile counter-position between the global blues and an abstract internationalism’ (Munck 2002: 16). However, there have been some positive developments in recent years to ensure workers’ rights. These include progressive changes in social policy, such as living wage ordinances in cities across the US or foreign trade-related clauses, and campaigns that cross national borders and link workers and consumers on a social justice agenda (cf. Armbruster 1998; Herod 2001; Mazur 2000; Zabin and Martin 1999; see also Chapter 2 in this volume). These cases highlight the results of worker mobilization and institutional or public support rather than the process of identity formation and struggles undergone prior to the outcomes, which in addition invariably tend to be labour victories. In this chapter, I suggest that efforts that seem at first sight to be fledgling
works-in-progress or even a defeat for workers can be highly instructive because the collective organization of workers is a long drawn-out process, which does not always end in unionization or necessarily involve unions.
Rather they point to important milestones in shaping worker’s consciousness about their political situation and the benefits of collective action. At the same time, they expose weaknesses in the strategies adopted by some traditional labour unions and the frequent failure of democratic institutions to uphold fundamental human rights at work. The research findings presented here demonstrate that it is possible for workers to regain a foothold within networked capitalism in order to assert their rights if the labour movement’s imagination is stretched beyond the form and priorities of traditional unions while heeding lessons from embryonic attempts to organize workers. Women’s groups, which are seldom considered part of the ‘labour movement,’ can in fact be a critical element of a vibrant, rejuvenated workers’ movement. This chapter draws on insights about labour organization gathered through
semi-structured interviews in Bangalore in southern India and Silicon Valley in California, USA, two key nodes in the global electronics industry. At each site, interviewees included a range of stakeholders who could shed light on the constraints and prospects of workers’ collective action such as workers, organizers, labour lawyers, union leaders and community activists. The emphasis in these interviews was on identifying collective resistance strategies adopted by workers with ‘outside’ organizational support in order to challenge problems in the workplace. The chapter is structured in the following manner. The first section outlines the literature on gender and justice at work, pointing to the ‘representation gap’ that exists for a majority of women workers, particularly in manufacturing industries. The following two sections chronicle some illuminating efforts by unions and feminist organizations to organize and represent electronics workers in Silicon Valley and Bangalore. Drawing on these case studies, the conclusion highlights the significance of these methods for the broader labour movement. Unless specified, all quotes used are drawn from primary research.
