A bet on Silicon Valley was a bet on the future, and the future after the solution of the ’70s meant driving down labor costs. The number of union members as a percentage of American employed workers began falling dramatically in the early 1970s, and Palo Alto was leading the trend. While big industrial cities battled legacy unions, this labor-hostile suburb kept its production wages low by locking organized labor out of its factories. For reasons that recall the agricultural struggles of the 1930s, large unions were not particularly aggressive about organizing the chip industry’s low-wage, polyglot workforce of immigrant women, while professional employees were mostly too well rewarded and pretentious about their work to be interested.9 What organizing there was had to come from the rank and file—it wasn’t worth anyone else’s time. Or, rather, almost anyone else’s. Stanford graduate Amy Newell came by her labor politics honestly, as they say, meaning she inherited them. In the 1940s, her father, Charles Newell, was the business manager for the United Electrical Workers (UE) at the Pittsburgh Westinghouse plant, where he helped lead the left wing of the left-wing union, and her mother, Ruth, organized for the UE at a Sylvania plant.10 After, in 1953, Charles was named as a member of the Communist Party by notorious FBI spy Matthew Cvetic at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into “subversive influence” in the UE, the family moved to Watsonville, California.11 Amy graduated from Stanford in 1969, having witnessed the militant turn in the campus antiwar movement, after which she enrolled in a doctoral program at SUNY Buffalo. On a visit to her parents in 1972, she saw the semiconductor workforce shaping up and thought she could help them organize. Newell persuaded her boyfriend to drop out of graduate school with her, and the two of them moved to the South Bay to start as “salts”—workers who get jobs with the ulterior motive of unionizing their coworkers. A couple of decades after the UE got run out of Sunnyvale, after Taft-Hartley purged avowed communists from the official labor movement, the Reds were back. Newell agitated from the line at her job with Siliconix, and with other rank-and-file semiconductor workers, she started organizing at the shop level at firms such as National Semiconductor, Siltec, Fairchild, and Semi-Metals.iv