Bitter Wages

Several women are wrapping gifts of talcum powder and candy for the upcoming Christmas party, while I talk to the personnel officer at the Intel plant in

Penang, Malaysia. She describes the charts that hang beside each operator's chair on the plant floor to record the quantity and quality of her daily production. She tells me about the factory-wide competitions and weekly quotas sent from California.

This personnel officer, a very likable Malay woman in her late twenties, speaks casually. But her message is brutally clear: a direct relationship exists between her ability to control and involve "her girls" and the numbers on the productivity charts. "Personnel operates with the goal of having management and operators cooperate. Otherwise, we can't survive."

This personnel officer's plant is a subsidiary of one of the largest semiconductor firms based in Northern California. Women compose 90 percent of the assembly workforce in this 1400-person factory, as well as in 18 other electronics factories in Penang. Approximately 19,000 women work in these plants. In all, about 250,000 women work in electronics plants throughout East Asia.

As the fastest growing industry in Southeast Asia the newest frontier for the industry--the region's semiconductor factories are part of a global assembly line stretching more than halfway around the world. This assembly line's growth has received a special impetus from the nature of the industry. Semiconductors are the "brains" of a new generation of electronics products: hand calculators, digital watches, computers, communications equipment, "smart bombs" and strategic missile guidance systems. Ironically, the almost invisible element in . this glamorous, breakthrough industry is the repetitive, semi-skilled labor of East Asian women. The high-value, low-weight volume nature of the product eliminates proximity to markets or raw materials as significant factors in the siting of production. Instead, driven by the need to cut prices in their competition for shares of the market, virtually all the major semiconductor companies have sought cheap labor to perform the labor-intensive parts of their operations. To a large extent, they have found this cheap labor in Last Asia in general and, with increasing frequency, in Southeast Asia, in particular.

The multinational semiconductor firms in East Asia-U.S. giants such as Fairchild Camera, National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments and Motorola, as well as about 30 other U.S., European and Japanese companies-have channelled their efforts into developing a whole battery of methods to manipulate and control the women who work in their plants. Their personnel policies now combine authoritarian discipline with the most sophisticated human relations techniques. Most highly developed in Malaysia, these techniques specifically exploit the traditionally defined attributes of femininity passivity, submissiveness, sentimentality, sexual desirability-creating a factory lifestyle distinct from that of the general society. Their purpose is to make workers more immediately productive and to nurture in them a long-term sense of identity with the company. At the same time, the emphasis on passive and ornamental femininity is intended to forestall the rise of any sense of independence or unified strength among the women workers.

The companies' manipulative labor policies are not surprising given the hazardous work conditions and low pay that are the calling cards of employment in the multinational semiconductor plants of East Asia. A photograph of the interior of an electronics plant is striking for its sense of immaculate order: a spacious, well-lit room in which rows of women dressed in white bend over microscopes. On an actual walk through a plant, however, the visitor often gags on the strong smell of chemicals, and a trial look through a microscope quickly produces dizziness or a headache. Toxic fumes and liquids and eye ailments are the twin enemies of electronics workers. While protective clothing such as gloves and masks are sometimes available, workers are not required to wear them and, since they are not informed of the hazards of their work, prefer not to wear them. Gloves would slow them down, bringing the disfavor of their productivity-conscious plant managers.

Detailed medical studies of the conditions faced by electronics workers in East Asia are few, due to the difficulties in achieving routine access to a plant's workers, and employee fears of reprisals by management for participating in such studies. Most evidence documenting the impact of the hazardous conditions is thus garnered from personal interviews and investigations.

"Hey, Grandma!" Young women greet their slightly older co-workers at the factory gate every morning. In Hong Kong, most electronics workers over age 25 are called "Grandma" because they wear glasses. A 1975 study conducted in South Korea by the Urban Industrial Mission, an international church group, concluded that of the women who work at the microscopes, bonding super-fine wires to wafer-thin chips, nearly half suffered from nearsightedness and 19 percent suffered astigmatism. While workers in Southeast Asia are much newer to microelectronics employment than those in Hong Kong, they too are beginning to have serious eye problems. From extensive interviewing, it emerges that at one time or another, most workers contract conjunctivitis, a painful and highly contagious eye ailment. After three or four years of peering through a microscope, a worker's vision begins to permanently blur, so that she can no longer meet the production quota. Virtually anyone who stays on the job for three or more years must eventually wear glasses. The unspoken expectation of the company is that the worker will marry and "retire" when poor eyesight makes her unfit to work. If she does not retire, she will be laid off.

Caustic chemicals, all toxic and some believed carcinogenic, sit in open containers beside many workers, releasing the fumes that so assault first-time visitors to the plant. They include trichloroethylene (TCE), xylene and methyl ethyl ketone (MEK), all particularly dangerous acids and solvents used extensively throughout the production process. Workers who must dip components in acids and rub them with solvents frequently experience serious burns, dizziness and nausea. TCE, widely used to "degrease" parts, is a particular cause for concern. Classified as a cancer-causing substance by the U.S. National Cancer Institute in 1978, TCE's detrimental long-term effects represent only a part of the problem. The solvent, now being phased out of use in the U.S., often induces lapses in -judgment and motor coordination, which when combined with the high speed work processes the companies demand, make workers prone to serious accidents due to chemical spills.

With the exception of plants in the labor-scarce city states of Singapore. and Hong Kong, the pay women receive in exchange for submitting to these hazardous working conditions is usually subsistence or less. The companies use various means to keep wages low, even though many electronics workers are expected to contribute substantially to their families' income. In the Philippines and Indonesia, women are paid less than the minimum wage for as long as six months, during which they are considered apprentices. With legal minimum daily wages of 11 pesos (US$ 1.70) in the Philippines and Rp. 500 (US$ .75) in Indonesia, electronics apprentices receive eight pesos or Rp. 390 respectively. Yet personnel officers readily admitted that a new operator can learn her job in a week, or at most, two. Such pay is in many cases less than subsistence for one person. In Manila, a worker living in the six-by-six-foot extension of a squatter hut told me she needed ten pesos a day for the bare minimum of fish, rice, water and rent. A community organizer in the province of Bataan reported that peasant families often had to support their daughters for the first months, and often the first year, of employment in factories in the Bataan Export Processing Zone of Manila.

Rather than offer adequate wages, companies use monetary bonuses to put pressure on their workers even after the apprenticeship period. In order to earn adequate income, a worker must qualify for the monthly bonuses, which are paid for perfect attendance, punctuality, high production, work on the microscopes. With any infraction of company rules or a single absence in a month, a woman loses her eligibility for extra payment. This practice is particularly rampant in Hong Kong, where industry uses monetary incentives rather than recreational activities to discipline and motivate the work force. There, in early 1979, a worker could earn a daily wage base of HK$24 (US$5) and collect an additional living allowance (US$.60), meal allowance (US$ .40), and travel allowance (US$.20). However, if she is 15 minutes late, she will lose all allowances for the day. Less extreme versions of this system coexist in other parts of Southeast Asia with nonmonetary incentives.

To maintain full control over their workforces, the semiconductor multinationals have perfected a range of policies that employ "social engineering" to undercut the development of worker militancy. One American plant manager in Penang explained, "We've developed recreation to a technique. Recreational activities keep turnover down. We spend US$100,000 a year on personnel activities." Much of the organized recreation takes the form of competitions, ranging from beauty pageants to singing contests, which are intended in the words of one personnel officer, to "develop incentive and motivation." Competitions pit workers against one another, strengthening their sense of ,individualism and their willingness to work hard.

Production competitions, also billed as "fun," barely mask speed-ups and provide the rationale for increasing quotas. Like the other contests, production competitions take place at all levels of the organization. They range from individual contests based on the daily charts hanging beside each worker, to competitions between subsidiaries in different countries. Workers in one Indonesian factory reported they had been asked to compete with the productivity charts of workers in other Asian subsidiaries of their company. Individual winners usually receive special mention in the company publications, sometimes with a box of candy or some money.

In the transition from beauty contests to production competitions, the guiding principle behind all the clever games becomes suddenly visible: control. Discipline is strict, because electronics components are either perfect or unusable. Workers are assigned quotas and monitored by daily productivity charts. They are prohibited from talking on the factory floor. They must wear uniforms. They are allowed an average of only 45 minutes break time during an eight hour shift, and workers at the Fairchild factory in Indonesia reported having only one ten-minute tea break and a 15-minute lunch break. They also said about 20 women were laid off every week for failing to meet their production quotas.

Management representatives throughout Southeast Asia express the same thought: "If management operates well, it is my hope that a union will be unnecessary." "Unions only set up an adversary relationship between workers and management." "Intel doesn't believe in unions. We believe in finding out what workers want. We conduct twice-yearly attitude surveys with workers." Back in California, a National Semiconductor executive went further, explaining that the industry stresses human relations to prevent unionization, because it would raise wage costs immediately and rigidify the size of the work force in the future. The industry wants to retain its ability to lay off workers if the market slumps or if automation becomes profitable.

The electronics industry has not operated in a vacuum in constructing its East Asian circuit. Governments, looking for development capital and solutions to their employment problems, have actively sought microelectronics investment. Semiconductors have appeared particularly attractive, according to one Malaysian government official, because "they are so fast moving. They come in and quickly soak up people." In addition, governments hope to acquire new technology from the semiconductor industry. In wooing foreign investment, East Asian governments have stressed the availability of large, cheap pools of female labor.

Domestically, East Asian governments have taken measures to make their country's women more attractive as potential employees by ensuring that they will not resist demands made on them by the foreign firms. In 1970, when electronics companies wanted to locate in Malaysia, the government provided exemptions in a law protecting women from night-shift work. In the Philip-., pines, Presidential Decree No. 148, issued shortly after Marcos' declaration of martial law in 1972, reduced maternity benefits from 60 percent of pay for 14 weeks to 100 percent of pay for six weeks, and limited coverage to the first four children. According to the personnel director at one textile factory, "this made it profitable to hire women again."

Perhaps even more serious than the reduction of legal protections has been the active role of capitalist Southeast Asian governments in putting down worker protest, which almost invariably assumes the form of sit-down strikes and non-violent opposition. In most East Asian countries unions are nonexistent, while the government-run unions in Singapore and South Korea block, rather than support, worker challenges to management. Over and over again the story is told-in the Philippines, in Indonesia, in Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea: "As soon as the protest began, carloads of police and government officials descended on the plant," observed South Korean workers in a report on a recent sit-down strike there.

Despite the enthusians of Southeast Asian governments, the role of the semiconductor industry in the development of their economies is dubious at best. Semiconductors is generally a highly dependent industry It relies upon foreign imports, capital, technology and, perhaps most importantly, consumer markets. When demand in the industrialized world slackened during the recessions of 1974 and 1977, many factories closed down, sometimes literally in the middle of shifts, resulting in the layoff of thousands of workers. The electronics industries are unquestionably major sources of foreign exchange for these economies: workers are paid in the local currency, and companies must purchase that currency with some of the foreign exchange they receive for sales in industrialized countries. Many critics of the "export-platform" strategy, however, note that the foreign exchange the economies earn does little to improve the living standards of those who work to earn it; most of the goods these lower-income people buy are locally-produced and hence do not require foreign exchange. Instead, as Lenny Seigel, director of the California-based Pacific Studies Center points out in a recent report: "foreign money makes it possible for more affluent Asians to purchase luxury goods, or to support the continuation of luxury-producing import substitution industries."

In the rush to compete for multinational investment by offering firms ever-greater financial subsidies, governments have effectively signed away many of the potential benefits that could be won through harder bargaining on the part of all host-country governments. In almost every country the companies build plants in free trade "export-processing" zones, where governments focus all of their investment incentives. Here they generally operate free of tariffs and controls on profit repatriation and foreign exchange remittances, with long tax holidays and special anti-strike laws in force. In Thailand, for example, companies may receive tax holidays of up to eight years, and then are granted corporate tax rates one-half the ordinary rate.

Even the most obvious benefit of the semiconductor industry-its employment effect-raises complex questions. While they have brought thousands of jobs to Asia, the plants requirements for young educated women means they lure a new category of people into an already overcrowded urban labor market, rather than alleviating the unemployment crisis amongst men and older women. Recent high school graduates from small villages flock to the cities in search of jobs in the semiconductor plants. Normally the daughters of high income villagers, the young women, frustrated by . the lack of clerical and semi-skilled job opportunities at home, turn to semiconductor firms as their only option.

East Asian electroncis workers share much more than they know with their Northern California co-workers. Approximately 60,000 assemblers toil in the plants of Santa Clara Valley-Silicon Valley, as it is popularly called in deference to the main material from which semiconductors are built-to begin the production process and to test the finished products after Asian assemblers have completed their work. Ninety percent of these American workers are women, and roughly half of them are of Asian and Latin origin, including Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Azoreans. Unlike their Southeast Asian sisters, many of the women in California plants are single mothers who provide their families' primary support.

Their pay rarely exceeds $5 per hour, and most earn minimum wage.

Workers in East Asia and California are subject to many of the same conditions and problems, including job hazards, high production pressures, coercive discipline and human relations techniques aimed at preventing independent worker organizing. In California, the hazards arise from the great number of chemicals used in the fabrication of silicon wafers. The pressure to produce is expressed in forced overtime, speedups and competition.

Women in California are very aware that women in East Asia carry out part of the production process, because their employers constantly remind them. Many of the Asian electronics workers, however, do not realize that women in California do work very similar to their own. The companies use the international division of labor to manipulate and intimidate their California workers, threatening them. with the loss of their jobs if they organize or make too many demands. The plant can always relocate to Asia. Ampex, headquarters in Santa Clara Valley, made good on its threat in the face of worker demands, and by 1978 had moved much of its assembly operation to Taiwan.

Although virtually none of the semiconductors workforce in Northern California is organized, progress is now being made toward unionization, as well as coordinated opposition to on-the-job hazards. Following a campaign that organizers say was marked by the constant intimidation tactics of management, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) in late February narrowly lost a union election at Raytheon. IBEW organizers are undaunted. According to the IBEW's Art James, union activists "are going to organize the whole valley." In mid-1978, two organizations were established to educate workers on hazards and press for more stringent enforcement of existing regulations, as well as the enactment of more comprehensive laws. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in mid-February, issued a report finding that the Signetics' ventilation system inadequately rids the plant of air contaminated by toxic fumes. The company, and its parent firm, the Netherlands-based Philips Corp., are now facing a series of lawsuits by former Signetics employees who have been diagnosed with chronic illnesses that doctors believe were caused by exposure to toxics in the plant.

The first stages of resistance are building in the microelectronics plants of East Asia, as well. Regular reports of protests, sit-ins and work stoppages come from established factories in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. Worker unrest in Bangkok in 1976 is believed to have discouraged further investment there by microelectronics multinationals. Even in the newer factory posts of Southeast Asia, resistance is taking shape. In the Philippines, for example. workers in one U.S.-owned plant are covertly developing a union despite heavy government restrictions on all labor organizing.

A major aspect of organized workers' protests-in East Asia, as well as in California, is the investigation of their particular roles in international production. As they challenge the companies, workers find they must understand the international structure of this booming industry if they are to be successful in their attempts to organize across national and eventually industry lines. Worker organizations in individual plants and cities, often with the aid of Protestant and Catholic church groups active in the region, have begun to create networks between the workers in different countries built upon the exchange of information, and where possible, visits by delegations of workers to meet with electronics workers from other countries. It is a slow, difficult process, in large part because the tight security in many of the countries makes even routine correspondence on organizing matters risky for workers. Especially active in this area have been workers in the Hong Kong plants, whose higher wage levels provide them with greater financial resources to implement international outreach projects. Hong Kong workers have financed several trips to other East Asian nations. One Hong Kong woman summed up her 1978 trip to the Philippines:

"The 11-day trip was over, but the sight and sound of Philippines was imbedded in my heart. The Hong Kong workers should learn from them, because generally speaking, we are not so aware of fighting for power. This tour has helped me to identify my role."

Rachael Grossman is a staff member of the Southeast Asia Resource Center in Berkeley, California. In 1978-79 she travelled to Southeast Asia on a ten-week fact-finding tour. She is active in union organizing efforts in Northern California's electronics industry.

Much of this article originally appeared as part of a report entitled The Changing Role of Southeast Asian Women, published in 1979 by the Southeast Asia Resource Center and the Pacific Studies Center. For a copy, write SERC, P.O. Box 4000D, Berkeley, CA 94704.