The next couple of chapters brought up some interesting ideas about immigration, peoples ability to fight back, and the actual preceedings of the Silicon Valley problem. The problem of immigration has recently been a huge topic on the political scene. Both presidential candidates were questioned constantly on their stance on the immigration issue and were required to defend it on the national scene. This book, however, presents it in an entirely new frame of mind. The idea of immigrants is very appealing to unscrupulous companies because they are the ultimate source of exploitation. This class of people is given no representative status and is granted limited rights in every aspect of their life, none if they are illegal. They are generally migrating from poor nations and are looking to make American dollars which are worth much more. Due to this they are more willing to accept labor jobs that may be of questionable standards just to ensure that they have a job. Oftentimes these immigrants are very limited in their ability to communicate due to the fact that they speak only foreing languages. This has been used to prevent them from organizing because if people can’t talk together they cannot express ideas of organization. Also, they are essentially expendable. If an immigrant gets hurt, tries to organize, or complains about their job, they are very easily and quickly replaced. Due to the large influx of immigrants, there is always someone else to take the openned position which acts as another method of control. As shown by the examples of Chinese and Japanese immigrant workers, the company is in ultimate control. When workers tried to organize against the companies they were only successful in bringing new levels of injustice upon themselves. Companies would oftentimes retaliate to uprisings by reducing the already terrible low amount of rights workers had.
The other part of these next couple of chapters is the idea of image. Silicon Valley and the electronics industry were made up to be some of the most impressive ideas in their cleanliness and pristine quality. The electronics industry was able to successfully cover up the horrible situations of health violations and were able to recruit even some wealthy people to live the in environmentally hazardous valley. By posing themselves as a clean industry, electronics companies were able to avoid scrutiny for their unsafe and unjust practices. This was accomplished through incredible methods, such as paying off EPA workers to withhold information from certain studies and completely lieing about others. How is that possible? Isn’t the EPA supposed to be the end all be all of regulators?
It is good to see at the end of this section that there is action being taken against the valley to discredit the image it held so well for so long. Organizations are currently working to fix some of the environmental problems such as toxic water in the area. The fact that the image is broken has allowed people to see the injustices that are actually taking place and has brought about attention to fixing the injustices that have occurred. NGOs are working to take back the rights of workers and have recognized the violations instead of letting them continue to slide. The one hope is that there is continued efforts which are effective in achieving this goal.
