PSRP uses expertise to fight for workers' rights

Book presses for labor, environmental justice
in electronics industry

Silicon Valley once was known as "the Valley of Heart's Delight," says AFT member Leslie Byster. The valley flourished with fruit orchards and the largest concentration of canneries in America.

Then in the 1970s, computer semiconductor manufacturers swooped in, bought out the canneries, chopped down the orchards and sprouted a new kind of plant-one that made computer chips.

It took folks a while to figure out that the computer industry was a major polluter. After workers and citizens started discovering horrendous health problems in their neighborhoods, a movement began. Silicon Valley residents learned that solvents had leached from underground storage tanks and contaminated their water supply. Authorities measured one chemical at 29 times the legal limit.

"And workers were exposed to more chemicals than the community," Byster notes. "These high-tech pioneers were the canaries in the coal mine."

Out of an initial group formed to push for workers' health on the job sprang the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, whose mission was to protect everybody from chemical exposure.

Eventually, the federal government put 29 sites in Santa Clara Valley on its Superfund list of places requiring intensive cleanup of toxic waste, giving Silicon Valley the largest concentration of Superfund sites in the nation.

Byster in 1992 became director of communications and programs for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which at that point had been fighting for 10 years to clean up the mess.

"People should not have to choose between their jobs and the environment," she says. "As a result, we worked very closely with unions and the local labor council. The workplace is where people often begin to resist environmental toxins and injustice, making workers a community's first advocates for change."

By 2001, when she moved to Oregon and joined the Portland Community College Federation of Classified Employees, Byster had became an expert on labor and environmental issues in technology. In her current job, she's a project marketing assistant for the community college's "Gateway to College" program, which gives at-risk high school students ways to earn a diploma and pursue higher education.

But she keeps a hand in technology. An international conference on the subject in 2002 prompted Temple University to publish a book, Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry, which rolled off the presses last June. Byster edited 25 chapters and co-authored two chapters.

"She really stepped up and made this thing happen," says David Pellow, a fellow editor.

Aside from speeding the editing process by six months to a year, he says, Byster also drew on her extensive labor contacts throughout the world—mainly in the international metalworkers federation—to help the book accurately reflect chip-making today. For example, now that the pollution from chip manufacturing has been outsourced along with the jobs, Byster made sure to include research on the production of chips in Taiwan and the disposal of waste products in India.

The book's worldwide reach is paying off. Thanks to Byster, it now ranks among the top-selling books on labor policy in Germany and Japan.

"If it hadn't been for her push for a diversity of contributors, the book wouldn't have been nearly so inclusive, so global," Pellow says. "She had that working knowledge to draw on."