Soenke Zehle on Thu, 2 Aug 2001 21:26:21 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> e-waste |
dear all, geert suggested this might of be of interest. don't nail me for bumpy writing (yet) - i'll rework this asap. my interest: i'm trying to get an "e-journal for ecopolitics" (www.oikopolis.de) off the ground and would like to invite contributions for an issue on the topic of electronics & ecopolitics (e-waste, ecology & media crit and the like). contact me off the list if you have suggestions/contributions (goal: bring together media crit, media practicioners, eco-justice folks, worker organization in one issue on that topic). soenke Ecopolitics at the Site of (Virtual) Production: Environmental Justice Organization in Silicon Valley Soenke Zehle Hybrid Spaces: Theory, Culture, Economy (New York: Transaction; Hamburg: LIT, 2000) Among those coming to terms with the implications of the virtual revolution at the heart of the "new economy," few have adopted an explicitly ecopolitical perspective. Instead, many cyberenthusiasts marginalize questions of production in their embrace of the "clean industries" and their promise of "dematerialization through technology." An ecopolitical perspective might, then, take as its point of departure a core site of virtual production: the high tech sweatshops in which the elements of a new information and communications infrastructure are made and assembled. Long considered the "dirty little secret" of Silicon Valley, these archaic forms of labor organization reveal the inglorious base of the "new economy" as well as the toxic materiality of a virtual revolution whose tremendous ecological costs are suffered not only by immigrant sweatshop workers but everyone involved in the cycle of electronics production, use, and disposal. The Challenge of Cold War Worker Organization The electronics industries rose in the 1950s on a wave of governmental subsidies, in an aggressively anticommunist period that saw the growth of a national security state as well as the fragmentation and dismantling of many labor unions. Committed to the economic and political orthodoxies of postwar anticommunism, major union leaders worked to purge their federations of radicals, eliminating the specter of rank-and-file militancy along with hopes for union democracy and a broader vision of social transformation. One of the organization affected by this struggle was the union founded to organize workers in the electrical and communications industries - the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). Along with a few other unions, UE had already succeeded in organizing workers at General Electric (GE) and Westinghouse, the corporate giants of the electrical industries, which soon grew into multipurpose engineering firms with a stake in the postwar military production of computers and electronics. Lead by socialists and communists, UE quickly found itself expelled from the federations representing organized labor, its members raided by rival unions and its leaders called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Schatz 1983). Politically sensitive military production, widespread suspicion of autonomous worker organization, and an unprecedented pace of technological change turned the new electronics industries into "laboratories for developing personnel-management techniques for maintaining a union-free environment" (Bacon 1997a). While official labor leaders had abandoned the electronics industries as unorganizable, UE recovered outside the AFL-CIO and began to target semiconductor plants in the 1970s. Traditional US organizing campaigns focus on certification elections supervised by a National Labor Relations Board in which workers declare that they wish to be represented by a union, which is then recognized as partner in collective bargaining by the corporation. The longer the campaign, the more vulnerable it is to attrition and company interference; more recent campaigns (especially those organizing sub-contractors) have relied less on labor law and pressured (parent) companies directly, through boycotts and media attacks on corporate brands and images. Amy Newell, later one of the first high-ranking women officers of UE, was an early member of the UE Electronics Organizing Committee and knew that isolated workplace efforts would have to be supported by community outreach: "It's hard to imagine organizing any of the plants without a much larger movement among workers in the industry as a whole, and in the communities in which the workers live" (Bacon 1997a). Romie Manan, one of the Filipino organizers, remembers the secretive atmosphere: "A few of us were aboveground, to give workers the idea that the union was an open and legitimate organization, but most workers were not publicly identified with the union" (ibid.). By the early 1980s, the Committee had grown to a membership of over 500 workers, distributed 5,000 copies of its Union Voice a month (published in three languages: English, Spanish, and Tagalog), won cost-of-living raises, held public hearings on racism and firings in the plants, and campaigned to expose the dangers of working with numerous toxic chemicals, without having won either an election or a contract. The last UE campaign in 1982 tried to mobilize opposition to the industry's policy of moving production out of Silicon Valley. Many UE members were ultimately fired as electronics corporations singled out activists, ending a first wave of organizing campaigns which had received no support from official representatives of organized labor and did not survive the advent of the Reagan Era. While the Committee dispersed, some members left to work with new organizations they had helped establish, including the Santa Clara Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (SCCOSH) and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), on worker health and safety issues. On the WWW LaborNotes http://www.labornotes.org/ Stories & Photographs by David Bacon http://www.igc.org/dbacon/ UE http://www.ranknfile-ue.org Alliance UE-FAT (Frente Autentico del Trabajo) http://www.ueinternational.org/ Santa Clara Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (SCCOSH) Amanda Hawes, one of the founders of SCCOSH, reflects on the emergence of toxics organizing in Silicon Valley: Compared to hazards of traditional fruit processing in our Valley of Heart's Delight - repetitive motion injuries, finger lacerations, heat stress, and slips and falls - conditions in Silicon Valley's "clean industry" looked good, especially to workers laid off after years of back-breaking seasonal work in the canneries (Hawes 1997). Workshops held by the new ECOSH (Electronics Committee for Occupational Safety and Health) were met with skepticism by the occupational nurses, engineering students, labor, environmental and religious leaders in attendance. When a UC researcher needed volunteers for a study on TCE (trichloroethylene), ECOSH agreed to recruit them, suspecting that TCE might be carcinogenic. After hundreds of workers responded with stories on TCE and toxic workplaces, ECOSH recognized the need for a center to gather and disseminate health hazard information to electronics workers and advocate for improved working conditions in what most had considered "clean industries." Founded in 1978, SCCOSH has become the main educational resource for Silicon Valley workers fighting to protect their health on the job. Across the country, a network of over 20 additional centers has emerged, making occupational health and safety one of the most active areas of worker organization. While ECOSH continued its work into the early 1980s with a campaign to ban TCE, SCCOSH received a federal grant from the US Labor Department for its Project on Health and Safety in Electronics (PHASE) which ran a confidential "hazard hot line," researched chemicals and processes used in electronics and semiconductor manufacturing, and developed hazard fact sheets and other materials to aid workers interested in protecting their health (PHASE monies were immediately cut by the Reagan Administration). Other early SCCOSH projects included the Injured Workers United, a support group for workers already affected by chemical exposures, trying to secure fair compensation, decent medical care, and retraining. During the 1980s, SCCOSH continued to raise issues of chemical safety, stressing concerns for workers of child-bearing age in campaigns to phase out specific toxics. Contrary to the mythology of the virtual industries, electronics manufacturing is a labor-intensive industry. Many manufacturing workers are Asian: the workforce mirrors the immigration history of the area, as Vietnamese, Filipino, Korean, Ethiopian, and most recently South Asian women and men of all ages have joined a Latino working community. Filipino SCCOSH members Raquel Sancho and Romie Manan have begun to organize them into HealthWATCH (Workers Against Toxic Chemical Hazards). Both Sancho and Manan are veteran organizers, with roots in the anti-Marcos movement in the Philippines. Sancho, hired by SCCOSH in 1994 to direct its campaign against glycol ethers, was an organizer in Manila's women's movement and still recruits U.S. supporters for Gabriela, a left-wing women's organization in the islands. Organizing workers in the US nevertheless proved difficult: "It was hard getting immigrant workers to picket the plants without having a long period of involvement with them around this issue" (Bacon 1997b). To build a base of workers, Sancho went to karaoke bars, malls, and was soon invited to picnics and family occasions. Romie Manan was a unionist in the Philippines, in what Bacon considers one of the most militant and turbulent labor movements in Asia during the 1970s yet another irony of post-cold war labor organization, since the AFL-CIO had continued to back the official pro-Marcos labor federation. Manan had to leave after martial law was declared by then-dictator Ferdinand Marcos and immediately began recruiting his Filipino coworkers into the Electronics Organizing Committee of the United Electrical Workers when he found a job in Silicon Valley. Unlike Bacon, who was active in the UE Organizing Committee until it was dissolved in the early 1980s, Manan has been able to continue to work in electronics manufacturing despite his involvement in virtually all organizing drives. Although unions are very popular in the Philippines where a much higher percentage of workers is organized than in the US, Manan cautions that while immigrant Filipino workers are generally interested in worker organization, many members of the same family often get jobs in the same plant, making them reluctant to take risks (Bacon 1997b). Discussions at HealthWATCH meetings have nonetheless convinced many of them to become active, and when a worker affected by toxics exposure asked for support, they launched a campaign to pressure the company for an investigation, wore ribbons and buttons on the job to express solidarity, and cooperated with the surrounding African American and Latino community which had already organized a council of neighbors concerned about their proximity to a toxic waste site. While an investigation by the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (CalOSHA) found numerous violations, the company was ultimately allowed to settle with minimal fines. HealthWATCH members concluded that immigrant workers would continue to be exposed to chemicals at home and in the workplace until a union contract provided some leverage to hold companies accountable and possibly allow workers to define their own standards for health and safety protection; WATCH hopes to offer initial organizing experience, SCCOSH publishes Chemical Exposure Guidelines to educate workers about the toxicity of chemicals and safe exposure levels. However, even union contracts may not be able to challenge the fundamental structure of the electronics industries. HealthWATCH member Raj Jayadev reminds readers of the rank-and-file monthly Labor Notes that the position of immigrants and their exposure to toxins are structural features of the new economy: "low-wage assembly and manufacturing has been the anchor of technological and economic growth. Perhaps explaining its rather hushed existence, it is a labor niche which has been created and reserved for immigrant workers of color" (Jayadev 1999). While low-wage temporary work proves paradoxically permanent in that there are neither "good assembly jobs" which would compensate for years of exposure and abuse nor unions that might be able to establish them, a small portion of South Asian engineers and business people have ascended into "Silicon Valley royalty," a phenomenon duly observed by community and media trained to expect no less than the fulfillment of the model minority myth. For Jayadev, this visibility has obscured the Third World reality of the South Asian majority, whose situation should serve as "an alert to animate the collective South Asian American consciousness" and focus energy on "dissolving the separations between labor and community organizing" (ibid.). Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) At the outset of the Cold War, the US military supported the creation of an institute to conduct applied industrial research at Stanford University, which soon announced the development of a high tech industrial park nearby. Since new semiconductor companies were hailed as "clean industries," electronics quickly became the industry of choice for municipalities interested in expanding their industrial tax base. Rising sales of computer parts provided taxes in abundance and supported tremendous growth: over the next decades, the county of Santa Clara would grow from the agricultural paradise known as "Valley of Heart¹s Delight" to become Silicon Valley, the mythical center of the high tech industries with the highest density of electronics firms of any county in the US. Today, Santa Clara has more toxic cleanup sites than any other county in the US, most of them caused by the high tech electronics industry. Since the early 1980s, severe groundwater contamination has emerged as the most common form of chemical pollution at production sites of IBM, Fairchild, AMD, HP, and Siemens: volatile toxic chemicals like chlorinated solvents, used in the process of turning an ingot of silicon into a highly conductive wafer, are often stored in underground storage tanks which leaked to permanently contaminate entire aquifers and continue to threaten the wetlands of San Francisco Bay. Similar pollution was found at local chemical manufacturing, waste disposal and recycling facilities (SWOP 1995). In a state experiencing a severe drought cycle about once every decade, groundwater contamination is a catastrophe. Much of the available water in California is distributed via complex pipeline systems from the fertile Central Valley of the Sacramento River Delta, which receives water from the rivers and reservoirs in and around the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Santa Clara receives much of its water via these projects as well. Since any decrease in groundwater availability can only increase the ecological and political pressure on the already overburdened delta, a fragile ecosystem threatened with an increase in salinity if more water were to be extracted, Santa Clara is likely to become more and more dependent on local, reliable water sources, and therefore to conserve and keep them free from contamination through tighter regulation yet another reason for resource-intensive industries like wafer (chip) fabrication to locate new facilities outside of the Valley. In fact, a global search has already begun for communities willing (or forced) to offer the combination of subsides, tax exemptions, and the promise of a streamlined regulatory process that has become associated with the costly bidding wars that pit countries, states and cities desperate to attract economic development against each other. The Silicon Valley Toxics Project (SVTC), another SCCOSH project, has done much to alert communities to the toxicity of the electronics industries. SVTC was founded by local activists in 1982 in response to the discovery of substantial groundwater contamination. SVTC succeeded in the passage of a community right-to-know law and accompanying Hazardous Materials Model Ordinance, the first law in the country to regulate leaking underground storage tanks by requiring secondary containment and strict monitoring. Gaining national recognition when it helped place the toxic waste sites in Santa Clara County on the National Priority List (Superfund) of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ensure adequate clean up, SVTC also exposed the enormous contribution of electronics industries to CFC emissions, promotes the clean-up and conversion of military bases and defense contractors, and now serves as an information center on the electronics industries for communities and organizations elsewhere. Current efforts include a Sustainable Water Campaign, a multi-year effort to clean heavy metal contamination from the streams and groundwater of the South San Francisco Bay area, a Clean Computer Campaign to reduce hazards from the disposal of junk electronics and encourage recycling of materials found in obsolescent computers, and an International Campaign for Responsible Technology (ICRT). Through ICRT, SVTC not only tracks the global expansion of the electronics industries to alert potential host communities, but supports (encourages ratification, implementation, and enforcement) of transnational legislative efforts like the 1989 Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste, a new EU Directive on Waste from Electronic and Electrical Equipment, the 1998 Aarhus Convention (United Nations Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision Making, and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters) and the World Health Organization-Europe Environment & Health Ministerial Declaration (London 1999). Their database (IHEAL, Interactive Health Ecology Access Links) is an international network created by non-governmental organizations to support implementation of these conventions and international right-to-know provisions (in an ironic and powerful extension of their very first successes: as pollution moves across boundaries, so does grassroots organization). IHEAL is an amazing example of the complex mutual articulation of locality and globality: by providing web-based maps of pollution releases, NGOs can engage in public information campaigns and integrate IHEAL information into local ecopolitical activity (monitoring, technical assistance in community monitoring of toxic releases, the management of riparian and watershed data, and development of regional sustainability indicators). IHEAL aims at the establishment of communication standards for environmental information so that "environmental health & sustainability information will become as widely reported as the daily national weather forecast." Each computer is a complicated assembly of more than 1,000 materials, many of which are highly toxic, such as chlorinated and brominated substances, toxic gases, toxic metals, biologically active materials, acids, plastics and plastic additives. Short product cycles ensure that little is known about the individual, additive and synergistic effects of often exotic substances: many of them have not been tested for carcinogenicity, fewer still for reproductive toxicity, fewer still neurotoxicity, immunotoxicity or potential impacts to the endocrine system. After the trend toward product obsolescence was greatly accelerated by concern over Y2K compliance, the US alone is expected to accumulate 315 million used computers by the end of 2004. Because computers contain so many toxins, recycling itself remains a dangerous process, exposing workers to hazardous substances much like the manufacturing process itself. Given that only 6% (compared to new computers sold) were recycled in 1998, most of these are likely to be stored in hazardous waste landfills or incinerated, a dangerous process which releases vast amounts of highly toxic chemicals such as dioxins and benzene (SVTC 1999). Because the export of waste has long been a way in which the industrialized world has avoided expensive disposal and costly production alternatives, the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste for Final Disposal was established in 1989 to keep OECD nations from dumping their waste on less developed countries. The US has declined to sign the Convention, another indicator that the imminent waste crisis is likely to be solved through waste export, following the current (international) practice of waste incineration in China. In 1999, the European Union drafted a directive in response to concern over waste from electronic and electrical equipment, the main source of contamination by heavy metals and halogenated substances in municipal waste streams, overwhelming treatment facilities and threatening widespread contamination of drinking water. The WEEE Directive will require manufacturers to improve the design of their products in order to avoid the generation of waste and to facilitate the recovery and disposal of electronic scrap. Its ultimate aim is to close the loop of the product life cycle so that producers, who manufacturer the product in the first place and who are ultimately in charge of designing the product, get their products back and assume full responsibility for life cycle costs. By ensuring this feedback to the producer and by making them financially responsible for end of life waste management, producers will have a financial incentive to design their products with less hazardous and more recyclable materials. This change in the market economics in effect the internalization of costs that are currently passed off to the general public will encourage the design of products for repair, upgrade, re-use, dismantling and safer recycling (ibid.). Through ICRT, SVTC promotes transborder grassroots cooperation, working on WEEE with a broad coalition of environmental NGOs organized in the European Environmental Bureau. The US, encouraged by the powerful American Electronics Association (AEA), has announced to challenge this directive at the World Trade Organization (WTO) it is, after all, contrary in its aim to the very spirit of the "new economy." On the WWW BAN (Basel Action News, Basel Convention on Toxic Waste) http://www.ban.org EEB (European Environmental Bureau, docs on toxic-free electronics) http://www.eeb.org/publication/general.htm IHEAL http://mole.utsa.edu/~matserv/iheal/ SVTC http://www.svtc.org SWOP (South-West Organizing Project, eco-justice campaigns against INTEL incl. grassroots monitoring systems) http://www.swop.net/intel_info.htm Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) While is widely known that textile and garment manufacturing occurs in sweatshops abroad and at home, the enormous contribution of electronics sweatshops to the virtual revolution has long remained one of Silicon Valley¹s dirty little secrets. After Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) was founded in 1983, it focused on women in garment manufacturing and won significant victories that have led many to regard AIWA as a model workers center in the tradition of radical institutions more committed to organizing unskilled and immigrant workers than the labor movement at large. AIWA¹s campaigns are widely discussed as organizing models and examples of an emerging Asian American feminist movement among Asian American women activists and an (increasingly diverse) Asian immigrant community (Lowe 1997, Shah 1997). Recently, it launched several campaigns to support workers in electronics sweatshops. AIWA offers language and citizenship education courses, workshops on domestic violence, and was able to establish confidential hotlines in several workplaces an important service for workers whose immigrant status makes them more vulnerable to interference by management and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) than ordinary workers. In cooperation with other anti-sweatshop organizations, AIWA pushed for regulation of the sweatshop economy through an Underground Economy Bill which forced legislators to not only acknowledge that these archaic workplaces are indispensable to the "new" economy, but agree to regulation and oversight. Although the current political and cultural climate is far removed from the anxiety motivating early exclusion acts restricting Chinese and Japanese immigration, anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and widespread concern over a "Yellow Peril," the dominance of an equally problematic "model minority myth" leaves room for a few success stories while obscuring what HealthWATCH members Jajadev terms the "Third World Reality" of most Asian immigrants. AIWA also shows that grassroots labor and toxics campaigns among immigrants may not be possible through traditional forms of worker organization; while Filipino immigrants support unionism, many of the women organized by AIWA, suspicious of organized labor in part because of the role played by state-sponsored labor federations in their home countries, do not. These efforts highlight the challenges and contradictions of grassroots work in Silicon Valley and the new economy at large. Although organized labor has returned to the electronics industries, many unions are unprepared to address the complex situation of immigrant workers at odds with the history and organizational culture of a US labor movement only beginning to confront a legacy of business unionism, trade union colonialism, and a "possessive investment in whiteness" (Roediger 1999, Lipsitz 1999). In a climate characterized by hostility toward immigrants, suspicion of worker organization, and official enthusiasm for multilateral trade agreements that encourage ecological irresponsibility, grassroots organizing proceeds at an excruciating pace - workplace by workplace, toxin by toxin, neighborhood by neighborhood. The struggle against high tech corporations and their industry associations, exciting, innovative, and quite possibly the harbinger of a new (transnational) politics built on the joint efforts of labor, ecological, and ethnic movements, is nonetheless not to be romanticized: every now and then a (legal) battle is won, but without a fundamental change in the way the "virtual revolution" is theorized and, ultimately, organized, immigrant workers as well as all those affected by extraction, production, and disposal of the "remainder" of the virtual, rendered invisible by the metaphorics of technological transcendence, will continue to bear its cost. Works Cited Bacon, David (1997a). "Organizing Silicon Valley's High Tech Workers" http://www.igc.apc.org/dbacon/Unions/04hitec0.htm Bacon David (1997b). "Silicon Sludge: Immigrant Filipino Workers Fight Toxic Working Conditions in Anti-Union Silicon Valley." http://www.igc.apc.org/dbacon/Imgrants/10rodrig.html Hawes, Amanda (Spring 1998). "SCCOSH in the Early Years: A Founder's Recollections" San José, CA: SVTC News. http://www.svtc.org Lipsitz, George (1998). The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple UP. Lowe, Lisa (1996). Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP. Jayadev, Raj. (10/1999). "Electronics Assembly for Poverty Wages." Detroit: Labor Notes. http://www.labornotes.org/archives/1999/1099b.html Roediger, David (1999). The Wages of Whiteness. 2nd ed. New York: Verso. Schatz, Ronald W. (1983). The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923-1960. Chicago: U of Illinois P. Shah, Sonya, ed. (1997). Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire. Boston, MA: South End P. SWOP (1995). Sacred Waters: Life Blood of Mother Earth (Four Case Studies of High-Tech Water Exploitation and Corporate Welfare in the Southwest). Albuquerque, NM: SouthWest Organizing Project. SVTC (1999): "Just Say No to E-Waste: Background Documents on Hazards and Waste from Computers." San José, CA: Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. http://www.igc.org/svtc/cleancc/eccc.htm # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net