News

It is a region renowned for innovation and forward thinking but when it comes to workers’ rights, Silicon Valley is very much in the Stone Age.

A new report on the U.S. tech hub, home to the likes of Apple, Google and Intel, says low-paid workers are “invisible”, and reveals that the vast majority of cleaners, security workers and landscapers are employed by contractors instead of the tech firms themselves.

“These contracted service workers – not counted on tech companies’ official employment rolls and rarely mentioned in the public discourse – constitute the Silicon Valley tech industry’s ‘invisible workforce,’ ” the report says.

UNI ICTS is the global union for the IT sector. Reacting to the report, General Secretary Philip Jennings said, “Sadly, it appears that many of these firms are innovative in everything but their human rights.”

“The state of play at America’s tech firms is representative of the United States as a whole, where the privileged rich are getting richer and the working poor are being exploited with contracts that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.”

In a recent article for Politico Magazine, Amazon co-founder Nick Hanauer wrote that he foresaw “pitchforks coming” in the future for America’s super-rich unless increasing wealth inequality is addressed. Hanauer warned that inequality would result in the destruction of the middle class.

According to Forbes, Apple posted quarterly profits of 37 billion USD, making it the fifth most profitable company in the world. Companies such as Apple can help fight inequality and foster inclusive growth by paying contracted workers better wages, the study finds.

The report also makes the racial divide in the Silicon Valley workforce devastatingly clear. Tech companies largely use underpaid black, Latino and immigrant workers as cleaners, cooks and security guards while technical employees are overwhelmingly white and Asian, the report says.

The news follows recent admissions by firms such as Google and Apple about the ethnic and racial makeup of Silicon Valley companies.

Blacks and Latinos account for 76% of landscape workers, 72% of janitors and 4% of private security workers in Santa Clara County, the home of Silicon Valley.