U.S. chip manufacturers kept pace with Japan by recruiting a global workforce of women. Firms offshored the vast majority of fabrication work to Mexico, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand while filling local manufacturing roles with Vietnamese and Filipina women. Domestically, employers relied on the pseudoscience of racial difference: They believed Asian women were less likely to organize for higher wages than Chicanas, whom they feared were susceptible to the era’s revolutionary rhetoric. “Small, foreign, and female” is how one manager described the qualifications for semiconductor production jobs.3 Immigrant women in the Bay Area from Mexico and increasingly from Central America weren’t the right kind of “foreign,” and they found themselves relegated to domestic service work, an area in which they had fewer rights. Just as it served growers during the interwar period, formal and informal labor segregation by race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and immigration status boosted Silicon Valley’s profitability and kept the Bay Area growing while the nation’s other regional economies fell into recession.4

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

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.

The solution of the ’70s wouldn’t have been possible in California without a few carrots in the pile of sticks, at least for white settlers. Asset ownership in the form of appreciating houses and stocks was an alternative path to wealth, and coming to own land is what settlers are good at. White working-class homeowners began to identify as white and homeowners more than as members of the working class, and not without reason. If their human capital was depreciating rapidly, their home values jumped. In Santa Clara County, the house price index doubled two and a half times between 1975 and 1990.33 With home ownership also came guaranteed places in the California public school system, where the professional workers of the future (with their in-the-car wages) were trained. America’s society kept bifurcating, and without a powerful labor movement to push back, people were left trying to navigate their own families to the correct side. In that environment, the continued assimilation of migrant groups presented a pressing threat to white homeowners. They feared that nonwhites would undermine home values by moving nearby and that their children would take advantage of public programs funded by white tax dollars and end up competing with white children for future advantages. Equalizing opportunity sounds nice in theory, but in practice the attack on wages meant there was less of them to go around. For white settlers, equality was a step down.