Change of workforce climate in the Silicon Valley... Orchards disappear, more electronic manufacturing plants begins to pop up everywhere in the Valley.

Your products have evolved at an amazing rate, and are being used for a lot more things than just military equipment.

The memory of a circuit chip increased by a factor of 1,000, as its reliability.

If the automotive industry had paralleled the advances that the computer industry has experienced in the last 25 years, a Rolls Royce would cost fifty cents and would deliver fifteen million miles a gallon.

The domestic and international commercial market has enthusiastically bought in to your technological ideas. From your growth you have started transnational companies like IBM, AMD, and Intel.

You have met your huge labor needs by filling the plants with mainly immigrant women, and have excluded the black community who has organizing experience in the older industries and unions.

Some of you are getting sick from the chemicals that have contaminated the land.

Investigations showed that IBM as well as Fairchild was contaminating the local groundwater.

Birth defects in the residential area surrounding the Fairchild area are found to be three times the national average.

(Photo by David Bacon)

Thanks to the private sector's embrace of your work, you are making mega-money.

You no longer are just a contractor to the government, and do not need their subsidies at all.

Intel is leading the way by being the first to hit the 1 billion dollar mark.

You are working very hard(revenue per worker has been increasing dramatically), but are making less money. Business has destroyed your unions, and production jobs are quickly leaving the area to go to cheaper labor pools- unemployment is rising.

In 1985 and 1986 the computer industry cut 34,000 jobs.

The jobs which have stayed, such as semiconductor plants and chip production, have occupational illness rates four times that of general manufacturing.

This is likely due to all the chemicals you are exposed to at work: carcinogens, mutagens- acids, solvents, and toxic gases. Up to 3,000 toxic chemicals at a time..

Those of you who complain about this are fired.

Women incapacitated at Sigetnics (now Phillips) filed a law suit ,and were quickly terminated.

Since you are producing equipment all over the world in places such as China, the Philippines, and Korea, government is bending to your every demand to keep you in the area.

In fact high-tech companies in Japan and Korea are doing so well they are starting to be your competition.

Your smaller income is more problematic with the surging inflation rates, and rising housing prices.

Social support structures you counted on has been cut to offer business corporate welfare. You cannot afford the mortgage payments for the house.