The Political Economy of Work and Health in Silicon Valley

The reading that I will be discussing comes from the book Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy written in 2002 by Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park. Pellow and Park are both Sociology professors at the University of Minnesota with emphasis in environmental justice, racial and ethnic inequalities, and labor studies. Through this book Pellow and Park examine the Silicon Valley and the effect that rising technology is having on the area and its people.

This chapter is titled, The Political Economy of Work and Health in Silicon Valley. To give some background, Silicon Valley is a name given to the Southern portion of San Francisco Bay. It is home to many of the world’s largest technology corporations and many other start-up technology corporations. Because it is such a central area for technological companies, Silicon Valley became a term for America’s high-tech economic sector. Park and Pellow discuss the problems within this area, and the exploitation of minorities by the large corporations. They first discuss the unequal distribution of wealth and other ethnicity inequalities in the area, and with that showed the social movements that came about as a result.

They then change the subject and discuss the health problems that some workers in these factories are experiencing. Birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer were all shown to have higher correlation in people working on assembly lines within the factory, because the workers were being exposed to chemical radiation that was above normal levels. When the executives began to look into this, instead of trying to decrease the health implications, they came up with ideas such as preventing pregnant women from working on production lines in fear of damaging a growing fetus.

This part I found to be the most interesting, and through their research I pose the question: if workers are being exposed to radiation of chemicals during the process of building these items, are we also being exposed as users of these technologies? Through researching I have found definite interest in this matter, but it seems as though there hasn’t been any evidence to prove it yet. Cell phones emit radiofrequency energy, which is a form of electromagnetic radiation. Radiation is shown to cause DNA damage and cancer, however the type that is emitted by cell phones has so far been said to not be damaging to DNA. Cell phones are still relatively new in terms of seeing how they could be affecting long-term health problems, and I think it will be interesting to see if these types of technology will in fact affect the general user and not just the makers of these products.

Later in the article they discuss how much faster technologies are being brought about, and how there isn’t enough time to explore the possible side effects of new chemical combinations going into them. I think it will be very interesting to see for the future how much these chemical radiations are affecting not only workers in the factories, but also the general public.

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