| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Glenna Matthews, Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003).

AS CAN BE EXPECTED from a book that originated as a dissertation at Stanford in 1977 and then gestated over the next 25 years, Glenna Matthews' Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream is both broad-ranging and challenging. Questioning "how it could be that the prosperity generated by Silicon Valley has been so maldistributed," (11) Matthews argues that globalization, the decline of unionism, unplanned urban development, technological innovation, and the segmentation of the labour force into gendered, racial, and ethnic enclaves contributed to the contemporary situation in which "Silicon Valley's rewards are ... disproportionately going to the haves at the expense of the have-nots." (258)

Matthews begins her chronicle 100 years ago, when San Jose was neither urban nor high-tech but home to hundreds of orchards. A "great ethnic diversity" (36) characterized the area, with Irish Catholics, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Latin Americans, and Mexicans labouring in fields and fruit factories. As in most other industries during this time, women were considered unskilled and were given low-paying and feminized jobs. Yet even though ethnic, racial, and gendered prejudices existed, families of varying ethnicities and races achieved stability, security, and prosperity. They did so by operating small businesses in their homes, buying real estate, and encouraging their children to attain high education levels. Unionization, however, was the chief method by which affluence was secured, and during the late 1930s most of the Valley's cannery workers became members of the AFL.

During the Depression, San Jose's fruit industry began to decline. Casting about for new opportunities, the city's elites decided during World War II to capitalize on Stanford University's technological resources and to cater to military spending. Several major defense contractors located in the area, providing high-paid, mostly unionized jobs for men and women of varying ethnic and racial affiliations. By 1967, "60 percent of all electronics orders nationally were placed by the Pentagon or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, with California's aerospace industry being the single largest receiver of components" (125).

Numerous technological inventions accompanied the rise of the military complex, the most important ones being the integrated circuit in 1959 and the microprocessor in 1971. These in turn revolutionized the electronics industry, paving the way for the development of personal computers and the turn of the high tech industry away from the defense market and towards a consumer one. Seeking more scientific freedom than military spending offered, and wanting to escape the federal government's slow bureaucracy and rigorous labour regulations, electronics companies began developing products to be sold to private buyers.

Quickly dividing their rapidly expanding workforces into two tiers, namely, numbers of scientific employees versus large numbers of repetitive ones, major companies like IBM, HP, and Intel initiated a proletarianization and feminization of the high-tech industry. Around 1970, electronics firms started hiring predominantly immigrant women from Asia (especially the Philippines and Vietnam), Latin America, Mexico, and Portugal for low-paying manual jobs. These firms used — and still use — a number of strategies to keep their workforces cheap and loyal, including firing potential unionists and closing unionized plants. To keep their overhead low, they also operated factories in low-wage countries and outsource a lot of their assembly work to "subcontractors," who were often individual employees that bring components home to be assembled by family members. For low-wage workers, these exploitations were made worse through exposure to other undesirable conditions — both within the high-tech industry and throughout the Valley. These included health hazards caused by the toxins used in electronics production as well as exorbitantly high housing costs caused by a mixture of unplanned urban development and a recent population explosion.

Hence Santa Fe's transition from a rural, unionized region to an urban and largely non-unionized metropolis has detrimentally affected the distribution of prosperity in the area. Whereas 65 years ago workers could achieve stability and affluence, now working people's chances of attaining the "California Dream" are elusive. What is needed to redress this situation, according to Matthews, are organizing initiatives geared towards electronics workers. She also believes that unions should join forces with other groups in the area, including "progressive local politicians, social justice-oriented religious institutions, environmental groups, [and] grassroots community activists." (255)

The most valuable aspect of Silicon Valley is Matthews' analysis of the difficulties of unionizing the high-tech sector. Her informed observations on the decline of unionism in the postwar years, the individualist work culture in high tech, high tech's hiring of employees unfamiliar with unionism, high tech's outsourcing of manual labour to contractors, and high tech's tendency to shut down factories where the voices of unionists are making themselves heard are topics important to all who wish to make life better for those whose labour sustains our current "information age." On a broader level, they also encourage readers to rethink not only their own personal consumption of high-tech commodities but also the international consequences of global commodity production and distribution.

Also commendable is the author's explicit focus on the determinants of socio-economic inequality within capitalist formal democracies. Silicon Valley's methodology is especially helpful in this regard. By focusing on one region over a hundred-year period, Matthews is able to trace inequality's historical patterns: how and why inequality changes, but also how and why it stays the same. She shows us that first-generation immigrants in the 1920s were able to buy homes and thereby achieve upward mobility, but that first-generation immigrants in the 1990s find living quarters exceedingly difficult to purchase. She also reveals that while contemporary middle-class women have achieved some socio-economic success, particularly in mainstream politics and in some management positions, working-class women continue to face barriers to economic and political empowerment.

What would make Silicon Valley a stronger work, however, would be more theoretical attention paid to the themes of opportunity, wealth, and human fulfillment. When Matthews argues that Santa Fe's citizens must join together and fight for more equitable resource distribution, she implies that she wants to reform Sante Fe's political economy, but not to change it. Thus she is less interested in exploring the political and economic philosophies that support industrial market capitalism, and more interested in the introduction of small modifications to existing social institutions. For example, in her discussion of women assuming management positions within the high-tech industry, she says that Intel's 1988 appointment of a female vice president represents "genuine progress." (209) Therefore, rather than critiquing the existence of high-tech industry, she suggests instead that it should be made more equitable. Since Matthews' purpose is to show why power and resources are distributed inequitably within Sante Fe, it is perhaps logical that she should focus on social inequality's short-term determinants. Yet Matthews' avoidance of philosophical issues relating to contemporary liberal capitalism raises troubling questions about her book's underlying assumptions. In particular, Matthews does not question whether the social opportunities that she advocates are in fact desirable in themselves. To return to the previous example of women in high-tech management, she does not question whether women should want such positions in the first place; rather she assumes that it is positive when women attain them. Similarly, Matthews does not reflect upon the implications contained in her notions that people should want to own their own homes, should want to participate in mainstream politics, and should want to achieve upward social mobility. Instead, she assumes that all of these desires are inherently beneficial, and conducive to the fostering of human happiness.

Since Matthews makes these assumptions, it is apparent that she believes that the philosophical underpinnings of liberal industrial capitalism are positive. And it is here where her analyses become short-sighted. In supporting more opportunities for women in high-tech management, for immigrants' home ownership, for women and non-whites in mainstream politics, and for women's and non- whites' existing avenues of upward mobility, she is in fact suggesting that industrial development, acquisitive individualism, non-radical forms of democracy, and mainstream signifiers of social status are themselves desirable. Thus when one takes her arguments about equality to their logical conclusions, it becomes apparent that Matthews' understanding of an ideal society is based on a vision that includes some potentially negative aspects, including international industrial enterprise, large-scale production and consumption of commodities, conventional political machinations, and the pursuit of conventional social status. Though this book review is not the appropriate place on which to elaborate why these phenomena may not be conducive to human fulfillment, suffice it to say here that many of them are harmful to the environment, facilitate possessive individualism, and encourage political conservatism.

Hence Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream should be read for the valuable empirical content it contains, as well as for the innovative historical methodology it employs. It should not be viewed, however, as a guide to the formulation of critical perspectives on our contemporary political economy. Along with Matthews, we should urge that human life become more egalitarian, and we should especially advocate the elimination of discrimination based on understandings of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. But we should also be attentive to the broader philosophical assumptions that sustain North American social and material life. Most of all, we must question whether human fulfillment can really be attained by pursuing social equality within the contexts of liberal democracy, technological enterprise, and industrial development.


Donica Belisle Trent University

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