Perhaps the greatest challenge was well-organized employers, who shared information about union efforts among themselves and, under the auspices of the Packard-founded American Electronics Association (AeA, or the Western Electronic Manufacturers Association, before 1977), split the costs of anti-union campaigns, just as the Associated Farmers before them did. The competitors were able to come together after getting spooked by a 1968 strike of 5,000 Bay Area electronics workers across three firms (including Ampex), which lasted a week—the kind of interruption the fast-moving semiconductor industry couldn’t afford.14 Offshoring and the threat of unemployment was a good issue to rally workers around, but it was also the boss’s trump card. It’s a card the video-game manufacturer Atari played in 1983 after the Glaziers’ union neared its goal of an election involving several shops. Rather than face its workers across a collective bargaining table, the company laid off 1,700 people and closed two of its three Silicon Valley factories, moving production to Hong Kong and Taiwan.15 Unsurprisingly, the Glaziers found it too difficult to organize Atari workers at the remaining domestic line. Despite the efforts of Newell and other rank-and-file workers, the UE’s organizing attempts failed repeatedly, as did limited campaigns by other national unions—notably, the Teamsters at Intel. In 1994, scholar AnnaLee Saxenian described the results of the previous couple of decades in her comparative study of Silicon Valley and the Massachusetts tech industry: “There are approximately 200,000 union members in the four-county [Bay Area] region, but virtually none work in high technology industries. No high technology firm has been organized by a labor union in Silicon Valley during the past twenty years, and there have been fewer than a dozen serious attempts.”16 It was a brutal period for workers and a correspondingly excellent one for the men who employed them.