Abstract:

Research on environmental racism and environmental inequalities has yet to take seriously the question of workplace toxics and their impact on people of color, immigrants, and women. This paper is a step in that direction. We argued that the workplace should play a prominent role in research on environmental inequalities because the workplace is where 1) toxics are first produced and first come into contact with human beings, and 2) it is also where people begin the resistance process against environmental injustice. We support this argument by drawing on data from the high-technology sector of Silicon Valley.

High-Tech Environmental Racism

Introduction

Research on environmental racism and environmental inequalities has yet to take seriously the question of workplace toxics and their impact on people of color, immigrants, and women. This paper is a step in that direction. We argue that the workplace should play a prominent role in research on environmental inequalities because it is where 1) people are first exposed to environmental contamination, and 2) it is also where people begin the resistance process against environmental injustice. We illustrate this argument by drawing on data from the high-technology sector of Silicon Valley.

Research on Environmental Racism

Environmental racism is a scourge that has burdened people of color around the globe for centuries. However, scholars have only recently begun to focus attention on this problem and attempt to define it. One sociologist defines environmental racism as "the unequal protection against toxic and hazardous waste exposure and the systematic exclusion of people of color from decisions affecting their communities"2 Environmental racism is an example of an environmental injustice or environmental inequality, which occurs when a particular social group is burdened with environmental hazards.

Since the early 1970s, a growing number of scholars, activists, and policy makers have become concerned with the distributive impacts of environmental pollution on different social classes and racial/ethnic populations.3 The predominant conclusion from this research is the environmental racism thesis&emdash;that there is a widespread pattern whereby, through location (intentionally or otherwise) of environmental hazards, the poor and "people of color bear the brunt of the nation's pollution problem" (see Table 1.1).4 While there are hundreds of reports that support this conclusion, some of the major studies in this tradition include:

A 1983 General Accounting Office study that revealed that three out of four off-site, commercial hazardous waste landfills in the southeast U.S. were located within predominately African American communities, even though African Americans made up just one-fifth of that region's population. The report concluded that it was unlikely that this maldistribution of waste was the result of race-neutral decision-making.5

A 1987 study, Toxic Wastes and Race in the U.S., conducted by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. This was the first national study to correlate waste facilities and demographic characteristics and found that race was the most significant factor in determining where waste facilities are located. Among other findings, the study revealed that three out of five African Americans and Latinos live in communities with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites, and fifty percent of Asian Pacific Islander Americans and Native Americans live in such communities.6

A 1992 study published in the National Law Journal uncovered significant disparities in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) law enforcement practices. "There is a racial divide in the way the U.S. government cleans up toxic waste sites and punishes polluters. White communities see faster action, better results and stiffer penalties than communities where Blacks, Hispanics and other minorities live. This unequal protection often occurs whether the community is wealthy or poor." 7 This study provided some indicators of the causes of environmental racism: government inaction, officially sanctioned discrimination, and an alliance between corporations and the state to produce environmentally unjust decisions. This report also underscored that racism impacts people of color at all socioeconomic levels.

These and scores of other studies constitute an overwhelming record of evidence that environmental racism impacts millions of U.S. residents in communities of color.

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Table 1.1: Indicators of Environmental Inequality/Racism

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Widespread Unequal Protection and Enforcement against Hazardous Facility

Siting in Poor and People of Color Communities

Disproportionate Impact of Occupational Hazards on the Poor and Workers of Color

The Abrogation of Treaties with Native Populations, particularly with Regard to Mining, Waste dumping, and Military Weapons Testing

Unsafe and Segregated Housing

Discriminatory Transportation Systems and Zoning Laws

The Exclusion of the Poor and People of Color from Environmental Decision-Making

The Neglect of Human Health and Social Justice Issues by the Established Environmental Movement

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The Workplace and Environmental Inequalities

Thus the majority of environmental justice research focuses on the community as the primary unit of analysis. But because pollution is often first generated within factories and firms, it is surprising that there are few studies that focus on the workplace, "the point of production." There is, however, an extensive literature on hazardous work that has largely been unconnected to environmental justice studies. Important links need to be made between these bodies of research. These studies demonstrate that, in addition to being subjected to disproportionately high environmental impacts in their communities, people of color, the poor, and immigrants tend to confront similar hazards at work as well.8 These populations have historically occupied the lowest status, highest risk, lowest paying jobs in this society. In every way, the workplace is an environmental justice issue.

In the next sections, we present data from a study of Silicon Valley communities, workers, and the environmental threats they face. Viewing high-tech production through an environmental justice lens moves us beyond the typical accounts of the electronics industry that view it as somehow unique vis-à-vis other forms of industrial development (i.e. high-tech as the "new economy"), toward an understanding of high-tech as only one industry in a broader matrix of capitalist enterprises that have always sought to drive down the cost of labor and environmental compliance by employing women, immigrants, and people of color in hazardous jobs and shifting the attendant environmental burden onto their communities as well. While a few scholars have begun to consider the importance of the workplace as a site of struggle for environmental justice, this research is still in its infancy.9 The links between toxics in communities and workplaces are so stark in the cases that follow that the reader will wonder how scholars could have ignored this issue for so long. Centering the workplace in environmental justice research is important for several reasons. Historians have demonstrated that our knowledge of industrial toxins--the same knowledge that fueled the modern day environmental movement&emdash;is largely rooted in medical studies of workplace hazards generated in the early 20th century.10 This point is crucial because it underscores what some environmental justice and labor leaders have often argued: 1) that industrial workers were both the first victims of, and the first to resist, environmental pollution; and 2) if the pollution from smokestacks imposed upon communities is significant, then the impacts on the workforce inside the factories must be as great if not greater.

Silicon Valley's Toxic Communities and Workplaces

One in nine persons in Silicon Valley is a millionaire. This is a region where wealth creation seems to come with the territory. The biographies of CEOs at Microsoft and Apple are the stuff of legends, and the high-tech sector is the major driver of global markets. With all of the media attention on this "high-tech miracle," it would seem that software wizards can transform garage-based start up firms to wildly successful Fortune 500 companies in a matter of months. Unfortunately, there are several undersides to Silicon Valley's economic success story.

The first underside is the heavily toxic nature of production, which has done a great deal of damage to the natural environment and to the health of residential communities. The second underside is the fact that the majority of production workers in Silicon Valley are people of color, immigrants, and women, who are giving their health and their lives for these jobs. In this section, I will "work backwards" from the toxics in communities to their origins in the workplace, to illustrate the importance of the latter as a site of environmental inequality.

Toxic Production and the Impact on the Natural Environment and Local Communities

The electronics industry uses millions of tons of toxic chemicals that are emitted into the air, land, and water annually, and according to local activists and environmental scientists, this has produced an ecological "time bomb" in the form of the highest concentration of federal toxic superfund sites anywhere in the nation. One of the reasons for the toxicity of production in Silicon Valley is the requirement by many industrial customers (written into contract clauses) that the manufacturers use certain toxic materials. For example, the military often requires the use of toxics such as CFC-113 and explicitly forbids the use of safer alternatives.11 The USEPA estimates that a toxic plume created by eleven electronics plants in the Mountain View area alone (a community with a higher than average population of immigrants and people of color) will take $60 million and 300 years to complete. As for the once pure water and once fertile land of the Valley, 57 private and 47 public drinking wells were contaminated as of 1992, while 66 plots of land are too toxic for human beings to walk on.12 In 1997, the circuit and semiconductor industries nationwide landfilled, flushed, recycled, or released through a smokestack more than 117.5 million pounds of hazardous compounds. This toxic load was not distributed evenly across the Valley's population. In particular, air pollution in Silicon Valley burdens neighborhoods unequally by race and class:

"Census figures and Toxic Release Inventory air emissions data show clear evidence of environmental inequality in Santa Clara County as of 1990…TRI facilities are concentrated in [census] tracts where households have low to moderate incomes…some tracts that have higher-than-average Hispanic populations contain some of the greatest concentrations of TRI facilities."13

Table 1.2 divides Santa Clara County's census tracts into four equal groups, according to the percentage of their population that is Latino. These data reveal that those tracts with the highest percentage of Latinos are more than four times as likely to host a TRI facility as are tracts with the smallest percentage Latino. Or, conversely, the greater the percentage of white residents, the smaller the pollution burden.

TABLE 1.2:Relationship Between the Latino Population and the Presence of TRI Emissions in Santa Clara County Census Tracts, 1990

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% Latino All Tracts Tracts with TRI Emissions (expected frequency)

23.5-82.0 75 17 (10.25)

13.2-23.5 75 12 (10.25)

7.0-13.2 75 8 (10.25)

0-7.0 75 4 (10.25)

Source: Szasz and Meuser 2000, p.609.

This body of evidence reveals a "clustering of low-income, mainly rental households, and of certain communities of color and children in neighborhoods in close proximity to the valley's toxic industrial belt, along Highway 101."14 Thus the case for environmental inequality&emdash;particularly environmental racism and classism&emdash;at the community level in Silicon Valley, is strong.

The contamination of the Silicon Valley communities has been linked to the pollution in the Valley's workplaces in recent years. This process began with a number of toxic spills and leaks from electronics plants that have impacted the health of nearby residential communities. For example, in 1981, a newspaper reporter discovered that toxic chemical solvents from the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation had leaked into the soil, water, and bodies of the Los Paseos neighborhood residents in South San Jose. A health study later found elevated rates of birth defects in that community. Compounding this problem for residents was the fact that many community members were also workers at the plant, who received a "double dose" of contamination on the job and at home. The joint contamination of the workplace and community was clear. Underscoring the importance of workplace-community environmental links, one Silicon Valley activist stated:

"The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition was founded in the wake of the Fairchild chemical spill, which created a lot of cancers and birth defects. We organized around that case and that's how this movement really got started. We discovered 29 National Priorities List toxic sites and they are often in industrial areas where people of color, immigrants, and the poor live. This is environmental injustice and we have worked to highlight these problems in the communities and in the workplace because the exposures are the same."15

Dr. Frank Mycroft, Director of Toxicology Information Center at San Francisco General Hospital's Poison Control Center, concurs with activists like Smith. In the wake of a report of community-level chemical contamination, he stated that "any attempt to stop environmental exposure to toxic chemicals must start in the work place."16

In the next section, I discuss the nature of contamination in high-tech production jobs in the Valley, thus examining the origin of pollution in communities.

Environmental Inequality on the Job

Another consequence of such intense use of toxic materials in electronics production is the growing number of workers who suffer from chemical-induced illnesses. Before we discuss this component of Silicon Valley work, however, we will consider the population of workers themselves.

An estimated 70-80% of the persons working in production jobs in the Valley are immigrants, women, and people of color. Most of these workers emigrated to the U.S. seeking an improvement in their economic situation and simply lack the skills and social networks to move up and out of these jobs. But how did they end up concentrated in hazardous, high-tech work? San Francisco State University sociologist Karen Hossfeld has researched immigrant working women in Silicon Valley for more than twenty years. She once noted that an employer she interviewed revealed to her his formula for hiring production workers: "He told me, 'There's just three things I look for in entry-level hiring. Small, foreign, and female. You just do that right and everything else takes care of itself'. Employers assume that immigrants will work for less and that women are second wage earners."17 Thus, ethnic and gender segregation in the industry are the result of conscious and selective recruiting on the part of managers.18 "High technology personnel managers routinely link the broad societal images of 'passive Asians,' 'desperate Latinos,' and 'militant blacks' to help them hire individual workers and create a work force that they believe is less likely to demand rights individually or organize collectively."19 There is an age-old myth that women workers are supposed to have "nimble fingers" and be more skilled than men at performing the intricate work required in electronics firms. As one manager put it, "they're just so damned good at it!"20 According to a spokesman for the National Semiconductor Corporation, "Experience has shown that women seem to be more dexterous and generally better suited for this kind of work. The young men tend to get antsy."21 This is especially believed to be the case with Southeast Asian women. As some industry insiders put it, the "secret weapon" in the "competitive field of sophisticated electronics devices is the 'FFM"&emdash;or 'fast fingered Malaysian.'"22

Selective recruitment, therefore, also works against certain groups. As one activist told me, "African American women are angry at the temporary employment agencies because the receptionists are polite on the phone when they schedule an interview, but when they see them in person [and realize they are African American], they tell them that there are no jobs available. This is invisible discrimination."23 The author had a similar experience when applying for an assembly job at a chipmaking firm in the Valley. All was fine over the phone when scheduling an interview, but after the author arrived and filled out an application, the supervisor appeared from around the corner, looked him over from a distance, and turned away. Her administrative assistant emerged from the office just seconds afterward and told the author "my supervisor is busy in a meeting right now and won't be able to see you today." Given his phenotypic appearance as an African American male, the author could discern no reason for this behavior other than the employer's selective eye for "small, foreign, and female" workers. In short, Silicon Valley businesses deliberately select a largely immigrant, female, and (certain) people of color workforce to perform the task of production in the most toxic occupations.

The massive influx of immigrants and people of color into the Valley over the last three decades was a prime opportunity for the electronics industry to exploit cheap labor. Romi Manan, a labor activist and electronics worker in Santa Clara County, had a great deal of experience of racism in this sector:

"I have worked at National Semiconductor Corporation since July 16, 1979. I was hired as an operator on the swing shift. Discrimination at National Semiconductor is something I have experienced personally, something I have observed happen to others, and something which anyone can observe who wants to as a general phenomenon. The department in which I work was about 90% Filipino workers. Despite the overwhelming minority composition of this department, since I have worked there we have never had anything but white supervisors, white general foremen, and white production managers. That is the story generally at National, where production workers are largely Filipino, Black, Hispanic, and other minority workers, and management is largely white, as are engineers and office workers. The supervisor seems to share the notion that Filipino workers will never protest or make waves. Many white supervisors at National think this way and take advantage of Filipinos who have difficulty with the language and don't know their rights under the law. A large portion of all the Filipino workers at National are on the swing shift, and when cutbacks come this is where the company cuts first.24 At the time, it was estimated that there were maybe 6,000 Filipinos working at National. It's a minority group of workers in the company. It's bitter to hear it, but we're just cheap labor for them."25

Traditional racial exploitation of workers in Silicon Valley takes on a high-tech dimension, which involves exposure to high-tech pollution. Today, up to 1,000 different chemicals and metals are used in the various processes required to produce semiconductor chips around the world. These chemicals have many documented negative health effects on workers. Since the mid-1970s, studies have emerged detailing alarmingly high rates of occupational illness among Silicon Valley production workers. The rate of occupational illness among electronics workers is more than three times that of other industries.26 These illnesses include reproductive disorders, miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer. Masking this backstage of toxic horrors is a major public relations campaign promoting Silicon Valley industries as "the most fanatically clean, most thoroughly sanitized on the planet."27 As health studies and investigative reports have mounted, however, this sleek image has begun to erode. Table 1.3 reveals that the electronics industry in general, and semiconductor manufacturing in particular, are both associated with higher than average numbers of days workers spend away from the job due to illness and injuries.

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TABLE 1.3: Percent Work loss Due to General Illness/Injury in Silicon Valley

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1992 1993 1994 1995

All Mfg 2.1 5.8 6.0 6.0

Electronics 8.1 8.0 10.0 9.8

Semiconductors 8.5 9.2 11.0 12.8

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Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor. 1997. April.

A Filipino immigrant worker we interviewed, discussed the chemical intensive nature of the work that he and his colleagues performed at one firm. Many of his co-workers made the supreme sacrifice for our high-tech economy:

"There was too much exposure to chemicals. I handled all kinds of chemicals used in the wafer production. At that plant, there were so many issues in regards to health and safety. We tried to address them. Just by looking at the company's Safety Papers for every chemical that was used in the plant, you see all the symptoms in other workers. We had so many cases of miscarriage. We had workers who contracted cancer. It's not easy to pinpoint the cause, but we had a good number of workers who worked around those chemicals who contracted that kind of disease. You would think twice why that would happen. One of the workers who I used to work with died of cancer just some months ago."28

Flora Chu is a legal advocate for Asian workers in Silicon Valley. She places the story of a particular worker, Erlinda Carreon, in a broader political context:

"More than one hundred years ago, they lowered Asian men in baskets to insert and light the dynamite so that mountains could be blasted away and the Sierra railroads built. A hundred years later, Asian immigrants are still asked to put their health and life on the line so that California can prosper. Only now, the job hazards are sugar-coated so that workers do not know the hazards that they are facing until it is too late. Erlinda Carreon was a teacher in the Philippines until she emigrated here so that her daughter could have a better education. Like so many immigrants, she came to the Silicon Valley and worked in the electronics industry assembling discs that go into our computers. She put up with headaches, nausea and discomfort for the sake of a paycheck. What she did not realize was that it was the chemicals in her job that prevented her from having another child that she so desperately wanted. What she did not realize was that the chemicals that she worked with were building a cancer inside her. She died of a thymoma, a rare cancer that she realized too late was caused by her work. Erlinda's story is not unique for Asian immigrants. Many Asians form an underclass that works in the low-paying high-hazard jobs under constant threat that they might lose their meager paycheck. They are constantly exposed to chemicals that can permanently disable them."29

Resistance against toxics on the job in Silicon Valley has taken many forms. Many workers simply quit a job that they feel is too dangerous or low-paying. Others work with management to negotiate simple improvements in ventilation and chemical safety. Still others join worker advocacy organizations in the region and occasionally go on strike. One worker advocacy organization, the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health (SCCOSH), has assisted workers in bringing lawsuits against polluting firms and introducing legislation to change industrial policies vis-à-vis chemical use and storage. One of these efforts was a mobilization aimed at banning the industry's use of a particularly hazardous chemical solvent&emdash;TCE:

"A big success was our…campaign to ban TCE. The TCE campaign was noteworthy because it brought the spotlight on the chemical-handling aspects of the so-called clean industry at the same time TCE contamination of local water supplies was coming to light (with the Fairchild spill). But it was mainly noteworthy because its origin and focus was always the workplace. If hazards faced by workers are not made a priority, we will all suffer the consequences"30

SCCOSH has enjoyed many more successes in the environmental justice movement's efforts to reform Silicon Valley, largely because women, immigrants, and people of color direct the organization.

Conclusion

Production work performed by thousands of immigrants, women, and people of color in Silicon Valley is dirty, dangerous, unrewarding, low-wage, and low status. Ironically, these least compensated and most hazardous occupations form the very foundation of the Valley's economy. The concentration of these marginal populations in these occupational "sacrifice zones"31 in Santa Clara County is a form of environmental inequality with a long history, dating at least as far back as the 18th century.32

The relevance of the workplace as a site of environmental inequality could not be any clearer than it is in Silicon Valley. The major studies of environmental racism/inequality focus exclusively on the proximity of locally unwanted land uses (toxic facilities, factories, landfills, etc.) to communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, thus neglecting the equally important question of exposure to pollutants on the job. In fact, the few but growing number of studies of workplace environmental inequality present evidence that the poor, immigrants, women, and people of color face occupational exposures at a much greater intensity than those exposures that occur at the community level. This study of Silicon Valley also makes plain the undeniable links between workplace and community-level contamination.

Scholars are only now beginning to consider the role of immigrants and women in environmental justice struggles. In this paper, we demonstrate that one cannot theoretically or empirically separate these two categories because they are so deeply interwoven. Immigrant women are on the front lines of environmental justice inside and outside Silicon Valley firms. They constitute the majority of workers in the contaminated electronics industry&emdash;including those working in their homes&emdash;and they form much of the leadership in the community and EJ organizations that emerged to reform and restructure the industry. Most environmental justice scholars consider gender's importance only in the mobilization of women (as mothers) against environmental threats to communities.33 However, we expand upon these earlier important studies to demonstrate that gender matters a great deal with regard to the way that women are exposed to hazards in the workplace. Traditional environmental justice studies are highly limited with regard to understanding the links between gender and toxic exposure. This is because most of these studies correlate race or class with toxic waste sites, using census track data. The problem is that, while communities can be described (and neatly separated in a study) as "poor" or "working class" or "mostly African American or Latino" etc., there are few "female" communities on any map. So, by their very design, these studies overlook the fact that women are regularly targeted for environmental inequalities. There are in fact, "communities" where women are concentrated in close proximity to toxics&emdash;workplaces all around the world that are highly gender segregated. Toxic workplaces offer precisely the type of data that traditional EJ studies are unable to access.

The Silicon Valley workplace is a window to the future of many low-wage occupations emerging in nations around the world, as economic globalization expands its reach. By focusing more squarely on occupational exposure to toxics, scholars studying environmental inequality/racism (and activists fighting it) will strengthen their analytical and theoretical grasp of the topic.

ENDNOTES

1. An earlier version of this paper was titled "Theoretical Advances in Environmental Justice Research" and was presented at "Race In 21st Century America: A 2nd National Conference." Michigan State University. East Lansing, Michigan. April 2001.

2. Bryant, Bunyan, Ed., 1995. Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, and Solutions. San Francisco, Ca: Island Press.

3. Early studies focusing on the association between social class and pollution included: P. Asch, and J.L. Seneca.1978. "Some Evidence on the Distribution of Air Quality."

Land Economics 54: 278-297; B.J.L. Berry (ed.). 1977. The Social Burdens of Environmental Pollution: A Comparative Metropolitan Data Source; Freeman, A.M., III.1972. "The Distribution of Environmental Quality," in A.V. Kneese and B.T. Bower (eds). Environmental Quality Analysis: Theory and Method in the Social Sciences, 243-278 (1972). Research that was more explicit about race and pollution included: Bryant, Bunyan and Paul Mohai. 1992. Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse. Boulder: Westview Press; Bullard, Robert. 1990. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. Boulder: Westview Press; and United Church of Christ. 1987. Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. New York: United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice.1987.

4. Chavis, Ben. 1993. "Environmental Racism." In Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, edited by Robert Bullard, pp. 1-8. Boston: South End Press.

5. United States General Accounting Office. 1983. Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

6. United Church of Christ. 1987.

7. Lavelle, Marianne and Marcia Coyle. 1992. "Unequal Protection: The Racial Divide in Environmental Law." National Law Journal 15: S1-S12.

8. Bullard, Robert and Beverly Wright. 1993. "The Effects of Occupational Injury, Illness and Disease on the Health Status of Black Americans." In Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice, edited by Richard Hofrichter, 153-62. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers; Johnson, John H. Jr. and Melvin Oliver. 1989. "Blacks and the Toxics Crisis." The Western Journal of Black Studies 13: 72-78.; Robinson, James. 1991. Toil and Toxics. Berkeley: University of California.

9. See Gottlieb, Robert. 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Pena, Devon. 1997. The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Austin, Texas: Center for Mexican American Studies. Taylor, Dorceta. 1997. "American Environmentalism: The Role of Race, Class and Gender in Shaping Activism, 1820-1995." Race, Gender and Class 5:16-62.

10. Sellers, Christopher. 1997. Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to

Environmental Health Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

11. Smith, Ted and Phil Woodward. 1992. The Legacy of High-Tech Development: The Toxic Lifecycle of Computer Manufacturing. San Jose, CA: Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. January, p. 24.

12. Thurm, Scott. 1992. "Toxics Lurk in Soil, Water," San Jose Mercury News, May 4.

13. Szasz, Andrew and Michael Meuser. 2000. "Unintended, Inexorable: The Production of Environmental Inequalities in Santa Clara County, California." American Behavioral Scientist 43:602-632, p. 607. TRI are the initials for the Toxics Release Inventory, a system of pollution tracking that the USEPA uses to monitor large companies' environmental performance.

14. Stanley-Jones, Michael. 1998. "Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition Mapping Project Exposes Toxics in the 'hood," Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition Action Newsletter Archive, Spring 1998.

15.Ted Smith Speech, June 27, 2000. San Jose, Ca.

16. Kay, Jane. 1987. "Perils of Working in Silicon Valley." San Francisco Examiner. April 10.

17. "High-tech's Two-Tiered Work Force." San Francisco Examiner, April 25, 1993.

18. Hossfeld, Karen. 1988. "Division of Labor, Division of Lives." PhD. Dissertation, Santa Cruz: University of California; Park, Ed. 1999. "Racial Ideology and Hiring Decisions in Silicon Valley." Qualitative Sociology 22(3):223-240.

19. Park 1999, p. 231.

20. "Global Assembly Line. [Film]. 1987.

21. Waller, Bill. 1980. "Tucson Hits the Industrial Big Time." Tucson Weekly News. February 20-26, p. 7.

22. Baker, Robin and Sharon Woodrow. 1984. "The Clean, Light Image of the Electronics Industry: Miracle or Mirage?" In Wendy Chavkin (ed.) Double Exposure: Women's Health Hazards on the Job and at Home. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 22.

23. Interview with Raquel Sancho, Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health, October 8, 1999.

24. Statement of Romulo Manan Before the Santa Clara County Human Relations Commission. July 31, 1982.

25. Interview with Romi Manan, June 21, 2000.

26. See Schenker, Marc. 1992. Epidemiologic Study of Reproductive and Other Health Effects Among Workers Employed in the Manufacture of Semiconductors. Final Report to the Semiconductor Industry Association. University of California at Davis); Smith and Woodward 1992, p. 13.

27. Page, Jake. 2000. "Making the Chips that Run the World," Smithsonian, January, p. 40. This popular image of electronics as "the clean industry" emerged as a selling point to potential host communities whom had historically been inundated with pollution from traditional manufacturing sectors (e.g. auto and steel).

28. Interview with Romi Manan, June 2000.

29. Chu, Flora. 1998. "Asian Workers Health Project." In "Silicon Dreams." Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health's Workers' Memorial Day Book. May 3.

30. Hawes, Mandy. 1998. "Reflections of SCCOSH Founders." In "Silicon Dreams." Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health's Workers' Memorial Day Book. May 3.

31. Bullard, Robert. 1993. Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots.

32. Pellow, David. 2001. "Documenting and Combating Environmental Racism in Santa Clara County, California, 1777-2001." Paper Presented at the Peoples' Summit on Globalization, University of Colorado at Boulder. March, 2001.

33. Brown, Phil and Faith Ferguson.1995. "'Making a Big Stink': Women's Work, Women's Relationships, and Toxic Waste Activism." Gender & Society 9:145-72.

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