At SiliconGraphics (SGI), headquartered in a lushly landscaped industrial park just off Highway 101 in Mountain View, legal ambiguity like this is cause for worry. Inside Building 23 is the high-end hardware firm's temporary staffing center, an office of Adia, the Valley's third largest temporary help firm. More than 20 subcontracting temp firms help Adia's six on-site managers supply the 400 to 500 temps deployed daily through SGI, which has about 4,000 regular employees.
In the SGI half of the ground floor, casually dressed employees work in cubicles crammed with geek paraphernalia like model Death Stars and Duke Nukem mouse pads. In the Adia half, fluffy-haired women process work orders and time sheets. This symbiotic relationship is repeated everywhere across the Valley -- at 3Com, where Kelly reps manage the temporary labor force, at Apple (Adia again), Hewlett-Packard (Manpower), Intel (Kelly again), IBM (Manpower again).
SGI's director of worldwide staffing, Eric Lane, claims his company keeps close tabs on its use of temps. At the same time, he says many Silicon Valley firms probably need to re-evaluate their use of contingent workers. "If you're trying to get around a head-count management thing by using temps for four years, it's not a temp role," he says. "It's obviously a role in the company that now you have a person doing for a lengthy period of time and they're not being treated fairly. They're not getting benefits and salaries commensurate with everyone else around."
Lane concedes that market vagaries in the Valley can make managers "a little bit more careful about adding staff, and a little bit freer with keeping the temps on." He's seen problems develop as a result.
"You get a lot of temporaries who are grumbling," he says. "I've seen it happen at other places, where the individuals are in an environment for a long time, they're feeling like part of the crew, and they're not being treated the same." He adds that SGI tries to keep up morale by organizing special appreciation events -- like an ice cream and booze party -- for temps and contractors, and that the company also puts a nine-month limit on temp assignments.
But temps are still temps, and the idea that they may come to constitute a permanent underclass of workers alarms many regular employees, who see temps as potential threats. "There's really no natural limit to corporations outsourcing, except when there's nobody left to run the shift," observes one senior engineer at Hewlett-Packard.
He believes the ever-increasing use of temps harms morale. "Even though there's no implied or stated threat that we could replace you any day now, most people are insecure," he says. In darker moments, he adds, he envisions a Silicon Valley in which only a few have benefits or job security, while the rest of the work force is in constant flux as U.S. companies try to compete with the ultralow labor costs of Third World countries.
And Shannon Morris predicts temps' low wages and job insecurity will eventually bring about a reckoning for the very businesses that employ them. "I think it's going to come back eventually to give the economy a kick in the ass," she says. "We won't be able to buy the goods and services these companies we're working for produce."
If a unionized temporary labor force can control the labor supply, standardizing pay scales and stabilizing the work lives of people who now lurch uncertainly from paycheck to paycheck, Amy Dean can't see much of a downside to it. She points out that companies too would benefit from clear guidelines for their use of contingent workers. The only likely sources of resentment are the temp agencies, which would probably find themselves out of business, and less-skilled workers, who might not meet criteria for membership a union could choose to enforce.
As things stand, Dean believes that Silicon Valley's heavy reliance on contingent workers is actually increasing interest in unionism, making temps more open to talk of organizing. "As you see fewer and fewer options for permanent employment, and as there really is no other alternative, attitudes will begin to change," she says. "When we first started talking about [unionization], people were scared. We couldn't even get one person to come forward and talk with us. Now we've got people calling us."
And the flagging American labor movement has a lot on the line. After all, Silicon Valley may be the place where it creates organizing strategies for the 21st century. Dean knows the South Bay Labor Council has a major role to play in developing these strategies; what she doesn't know is whether temps are prepared to take it from there. "Here's what we're going to do," she says. "We're going to build the playing field. Whether they come or not, we're building the playing field."
Still, it's obvious she's betting that if she builds it, they will come. Leaning against one wall of her small and cluttered office is an architect's floor plan for an elegant L-shaped modern building that wouldn't look out of place in an industrial park of venture capital start-ups. The plan is for the South Bay Labor Council's new offices.
