PHOTO /JOAN SIMON
SAN JOSE, CA — At 5.5%, Silicon Valley of California has a lower unemployment rate than many parts of the country, due to the economic engine of the tech industry. Yet a study by Working Partnerships USA of San Jose, associated with the South Bay Labor Council, has highlighted the polarized employment situation of Silicon Valley, home of tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, and eBay. While technical professional employees average $62/hour, the support workers who clean, guard, maintain and cook on tech campuses are contract employees whose average wages are $13/hr. Although only 3-4% of the technical personnel are Latino or Black, they make up 76% of grounds maintenance, 72% of janitorial, and 41% of security guards.
Thirty percent of Santa Clara County households live below the Basic Self-Sufficiency Standard of what it takes to make ends meet in the Valley—$19.36 per hour for a family of four with two fulltime workers (and we all know how hard it is to get a full time job these days!). A study by the U.S. Conference of Mayors showed that San Jose had the fewest middle-income households of all the top 357 metros in the United States.
With the influx of the highly paid tech workers driving housing prices through the roof, low wage workers of all nationalities are living on the edge, and the most vulnerable are forced into homelessness. Whole families are crowded into rooms, and individuals rent sofas, floors, and even one side of a bed. In reality, Silicon Valley could now be called Silicon Bay as it extends into San Francisco and those working in the industry also live in Oakland and the East Bay. Thousands are forced out of rent-controlled housing in San Francisco with Ellis Act evictions, which allow conversions to condominiums; even Oakland’s Fruitvale District is being gentrified.
One solution that has been proposed for San Jose is a Housing Impact Fee on developers to raise funds for affordable housing. The Sacred Heart Housing Action Committee and the Affordable Housing Network mobilized hundreds for rallies and hearings on the housing crisis with the slogan “people who work here should be able to live here.” Another proposal is for a Living Wage of at least $16/hour for all workers employed by Santa Clara County and their many contractors. The County Human Relations Commission recently held hearings entitled, “The Price We Pay for Living in Santa Clara County,” attended by hundreds, many of whom testified passionately about the toll that the high cost of living in Silicon Valley is having on them. There are also current campaigns by SEIU’s United Service Workers West to organize security guards at Apple and Google, and by the Teamsters to organize the drivers at Facebook, all employees of contractors.
All of these movements are important in highlighting the problem and putting forward interim solutions. Some leaders also pointed out that the Silicon Valley 150 biggest corporations have $500 billion parked offshore for tax avoidance purposes. This keeps public funds low and leads to austerity policies that are responsible for cutting housing, education, health care and other safety net and public services.
We have to build the independent political power necessary to force these corporations to pay their fair share at national, state and local levels, and to force the government to serve peoples’ needs, rather than the corporations.
