Old-Fashioned Labor in New Economy

The documentary “Secrets of Silicon Valley” uses the plight of high-tech temporary workers and a struggling nonprofit to argue that the ballyhooed New Economy isn’t a rising tide that lifts all boats.

“There’s an idea of enlightenment that’s tied to ‘New Economy,’ that the backward labor standards may be in the past,” says Raj Jayadev, a former temporary worker at Hewlett-Packard who serves as one of the two key voices in the program. “I actually think there’s nothing new in the New Economy.”

That kind of contradiction is a recurrent motif in the one-hour documentary, which was produced and directed by Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow. The filmmakers repeatedly juxtapose self-inflating sound bites from high-tech executives with embittered or exasperated comments about the casualties of the Valley’s growth. Similarly, images of computers and other tech icons are mixed with shots of workers on buses, metal recycling plants and other Old Economy touchstones.

It’s effective theater, but the filmmakers leave unanswered some big questions they raise. In particular, the documentary does little to help viewers understand the economic forces driving the high-tech industry or the transformation of Silicon Valley.

Instead, Kaufman and Snitow are content to provide a soapbox for a pair of exceptionally articulate observers, each an advocate for entry-level workers and underprivileged residents. Their comments help expose an ugly underside of Silicon Valley, which has been glossed over in the New Economy hype.

One of those observers is Jayadev, a young man whose experience as a Manpower temp on an HP assembly line led him to become a worker activist. Buttressed by the comments of an older temp worker, Jayadev paints high-tech manufacturing as the new plantation where minorities perform stressful, hazardous tasks for less than a living wage.

“People have to drive in from 75, 100 miles away because they can’t afford to live in the valley they’re creating,” Jayadev laments, adding that even the labor unions aren’t interested in these workers. But the program offers no one from Hewlett-Packard to explain why it employs so many temp workers, nor does anyone from Manpower answer Jayadev’s criticisms about working conditions and pay scales.

The other central figure in “Secrets” is Magda Escobar, executive director of Plugged In in East Palo Alto, a lower-income community made up largely of African Americans and Latinos. Founded in 1992, Plugged In tries to narrow the gap in technology skills between the rich and the poor by offering free computer and Internet access and training.

Escobar doesn’t spend much time on Plugged In’s exploits, concentrating instead on the displacement of small businesses and low-income workers in East Palo Alto. Referring to “Whiskey Gulch,” a short strip of storefronts in the community, she says early in the program: “Rumor has it that everyone has to be out of here by January” to make way for a hotel and conference center.

Sure enough, the filmmakers return to the storefronts later in the program to show them being boarded up and, eventually, hauled down. “Without Whiskey Gulch being there, I do worry that what it means is that East Palo Alto will be a huge parking lot for Silicon Valley,” she says.

The program explores the economic impact of the businesses coming in to East Palo Alto only anecdotally. There’s no discussion of the number or types of jobs created, or who fills them.

“Secrets” also touches repeatedly on the pace of change in the tech world. Yet it makes no mention of the rapid downturn in the tech economy that began in early 2000, a fall that has shaken the financial foundations of much of Silicon Valley. Even though the program shows the drawbacks of the tech boom in the Bay Area, viewers are left to wonder whether things are better or worse now that the boom has gone bust.

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“Secrets of Silicon Valley” is scheduled to air tonight at 10 p.m. on KCET.