The people who populate tech aren’t just software engineers, technical writers, and other white-collar workers. They’re also the security guards, shuttle drivers, janitors, and cafeteria staff who work on office campuses across Silicon Valley. Their labor is often invisible but completely indispensable: if they don’t do their job, nobody else can do theirs.
Tech’s blue-collar workers are overwhelmingly people of color, and many are immigrants. Despite working in one of the world’s most profitable industries, they earn very low wages: a 2016 study found that they make on average about twenty thousand dollars a year, less than the median annual rent in Santa Clara County, which encompasses Silicon Valley. In response to this punishing math, many of these workers have unionized in recent years, winning higher wages and better benefits. But even with a union, life is hard—long hours, long commutes, and the manifold hardships and indignities that come with sitting in the shadow of Silicon Valley’s wealth.
We spoke to a cook at a major tech company who knows this life well. This is someone with deep roots in the Bay Area, with vivid memories of the first dot-com boom and firsthand experience of the industry’s local imprint. We talked about what it’s like to cook food in tech, what it’s like to organize a union in tech, and what the future might hold for the region.
I grew up in West Oakland, California, with my mom and dad, brothers and sisters. It was fun. It was hard. It was poor. We had a Texas Instruments calculator and used to play a game called Lode Runner on it. That’s the most tech we ever had. But I had good family, good friends. Oakland was the best place ever to grow up.
At some point, I started making really, really, really, really, really poor decisions—the kind of decisions that your parents tell you not to make. This led to discipline by my father. I got kicked out of the house when I was fifteen or sixteen. I started doing little side jobs, and staying with friends. Ultimately, I ended up having a son. That’s when I realized I had to start doing things super different. So I started working in the irrigation industry, which was a hot industry back then.
That was right around when CNN ran a special called Silicon Valley: The New Gold Rush [1999]. That’s when I started working in irrigation. It was like boom—you could see it. All around this area: Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose. Irrigation was good business because everybody was having money around here. You can tell the economy’s doing good when people are taking care of their yards. It was a beautiful time. Irrigation was hard work, but it paid well.
Then around 2008, the irrigation business started going bad. That’s when we had the housing crash. People couldn’t afford to get their houses done. In fact, they could barely afford to keep their houses—and a lot of people had bought their houses on fake-ass Wells Fargo bank loans and whatnot. That just, like, shook up the whole world. Suddenly, everybody was vulnerable. Even the irrigation company I was working for wasn’t able to keep up their payments.
So I ended up going to culinary school. It was my dad’s idea, before he passed away. He knew I liked to cook. Me and him had butted heads just my whole upbringing—I never wanted to do anything he felt like I should do. But I ended up going to culinary school. Which was bullshit—I swear that culinary school is the biggest bullshit ever.
Because they charge you so much, and you don’t even get the job they tell you that you’re gonna get. It does teach you how to cook. I’ll give them that: if you go to culinary school, you will learn how to cook. I did. I thought I knew how to cook, but I didn’t know shit. When I got out, I went to work for one of the biggest tech companies in the area, as a prep cook making twelve dollars an hour. That was around 2010 or 2011, I think.
No. As cooks, we’re contract workers. We’re not direct employees of those companies. We have to go through a staffing agency. A lot of people I went to culinary school with went through those agencies, too.
It was … hella wack. The people at that company … they were different. They really weren’t that cool. At the time, the tech workers thought they were the shit. They were getting all the perks and bonuses. They were at a fresh-ass company that was about to take over everything, and they knew it. I ain’t gonna be mad at them, but they were snobby as hell. You saw the Benzes, the Lamborghinis, the Porsches, the Ferraris, the Bentleys popping all up in the parking lot.
Some people got more sense now. Back then they were a little different. A lot of people forgot where they came from when they got some money, I guess.
I was there for a couple years. My coworkers were good people. The chef I worked for, he taught me a lot. But after a couple years, I left and went to a restaurant. I like working in restaurants, but they don’t pay. You’re making really good food for really good people, and it’s a fun atmosphere. But you’re busting your ass doing a lot of work, and it doesn’t pay. After the restaurant, I went to a catering company. That was cool, too. But once again, it didn’t pay enough.
That’s why I left. I was like, I need health care. I got a son. He’s active. He’s an athlete. If I don’t have health care, with the price of health care what it is, I couldn’t even afford a single Tylenol in the ambulance. You don’t really have a choice: you’ve got to go back over there and work for the tech companies. It’s hard for restaurants and catering companies to keep cooks, because they can’t pay the money that the tech companies can pay. These companies can drop a new building or a new campus anywhere, and they’re gonna need people to come in there and cook. So I started working for a different big tech company, which is where I still work.
Yeah, it did. The climate was different. At my current company, the tech workers are hella cool. They just chilling and getting their money, trying to have a good time. They work a lot. They bust their ass.
I get up early in the morning, usually at 5:00 a.m., and I get to work by 6:00 a.m. We prepare food. Then we take a break. Then we prepare more food. The service comes, and we serve the food. Then we clean up and get out at 3:00 p.m.
But everybody’s gotta have two jobs. Myself, I just started a new part-time gig. Most of my coworkers, when they get out at 3:00 p.m., they go to another job and work another shift. With the way traffic is, they have to go straight there. They have to be at their second job at 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. to get that next eight hours in, so they can at least be home before midnight. Many of them live so far out: they’ve got to go drive all the way home to East San Jose or Gilroy or Morgan Hill. I heard some people are even coming from Vallejo. You know how far that is from here? With traffic, that’s like a two-hour trip.
So that’s the typical day for most people. Start at 6:00 a.m., get home by midnight. They’re busting their ass. They’re really busting their ass. But you have to. Especially if you got kids.
A lot of people did grow up here. But they’re getting forced out. They’re moving further and further out. A lot of them are having to set down new roots when they still have their old roots here.
Oh, yes, a lot of change. I went to my mother’s neighborhood in West Oakland recently, where I grew up. That neighborhood was notorious. It had a lot of negative activity. Now they have houses there going for a million plus. Like, nice houses. They put some work in them.
But the changes that were made, I don’t think they were the best ones for the people. Low-income cities like East Palo Alto could’ve invested in low-income housing instead of bringing in IKEA and Home Depot. Why we got a fucking PGA golf store in the middle of the hood? I mean, I get it: the rich cities around us need a place to come shop. But that all used to be housing. So you take the housing away, and now you put the problem on the people.
If you ride down El Camino you see nothing but hotels. Hotels, but no housing. They’re building those hotels for the tech industry, so all these people can come in and do big business here. But they ain’t let us—the people that’s living here—get no part of the big business. That’s wack.
Some homies that I work with pulled me aside and said, “We want to unionize.” And then they introduced me to the people from the union. They wanted to make power moves. They wanted to give the workers the power to actually have a voice and make some changes. I thought it made sense. So I started going to some meetings with my coworkers.
We met at people’s houses. Or after work we’d chop it up in the parking lot for a minute. We’d go have a beer or pizza or something like that.
It was cool. We heard each other’s stories. We heard about how hard it is for each of us to get by and raise a family. And once you get to know your coworkers, you start seeing things a lot differently. You want to help them out. You want to make it fair.
It was hard. People are afraid they’ll lose their job. And they got a family. That’s a real-life situation. How do you get over it? The union people pump you up. They have you feeling juice like, “Yeah, if he gets fired I’m gonna walk off the job with him! They can’t fire us all!”
There’s a movie called Which Way Is Up? with Richard Pryor. Go back and watch that movie and you’ll see exactly how the whole system works. Because you don’t always know which way is up. It’s hard. People got shit on the line. They got families. But it’s needed. So you’ve got to keep pushing.
You talk to one person, and the next person talks to somebody else they trust. And so on, until you have a nice little core. And of course you’ve got to have some clowns like me, who ain’t got no sense so they talk loud and talk hella shit and get everybody fired up.
It’s a really good feeling. When people actually realize that they are worth more, it’s nice.
But once we went public with the union, and started negotiating our contract, it was difficult. That process was new for me. I had never sat down at a negotiating table before or read a contract.
A long time. It was painstaking.
For different people it was different things. But for me … I like to talk shit. I like to run my mouth. So I wanted the chance to just be like, “Yeah, man, fuck y’all!” Also, I needed a raise. I needed the benefits.
But it’s hard, because you can’t go on in there and ask for everything. You want to act like you can. You want to act hella hard-core and whatnot. But then management responds, and you start seeing your people fall back. So you have to make choices about which demands are more important.
It caused a bit of bickering, of course. “We should get this much.” “Nah, we should get this much.” “This is more important than that.” “No, we need this.” People disagree. Then at the next meeting, some people aren’t there because they can’t get what they want. You can’t please everybody.
Yes. They were a big help. I think they’re really cool people. Like, weird cool. Like, computer techie hacker cool. They came through and stood up and put the word out. They showed up at meetings and some of them even came to negotiations. They just went above and beyond. Hella cool-ass people.
The Tech Workers Coalition1 is forming these groups now that reach out and understand that everybody working for a tech company should be part of that company, in one sense or another. You see, these companies don’t want to hire the help themselves. They’d rather hire the help to get the help, so to speak. Above all, they don’t want to be responsible for the help.
Service workers like us are at the bottom of the list. And since we’re at the bottom, we didn’t have any say. They could just treat us however.
It definitely felt different. Even before we got our contract, when management first found out we were organizing, it changed the workplace. In our kitchens, the chefs are the bosses and the cooks are the workers. Right away, the chefs started showing a little more class. They started treating us nicer. Before, most of them treated us like peasants. Honestly. Most of the time they didn’t talk to us. They were just there to discipline us and keep us in line. But when they found out we were going to organize, their bosses were like, “Hey, y’all better get y’all shit together. Because we don’t need this kind of tension.”
Just like any other company, some of them get hired into that position and some of them come in as a cook and work their way up—the ones who kiss ass.
You ever watch The Office? That’s pretty much how every workplace is. It’s definitely like that in the kitchen. You got your boss that’s the idiot. Then you got the one dude who just don’t give a fuck. Then you got your nice normal people. Then you got all the ass-kissers—there’s a bunch of wannabe Dwights running around. They know what you’re going through because they went through it, but once they get their assistant regional manager title, they just start going hard-core on you.
But when our organizing went public, and that tone shift happened, it was nice. My coworkers and I laughed about it, actually: “He just asked me how my day was!” “He just said, ‘Thank you’!” Simple shit like that. They started treating us like people. That was a good feeling. That was a really, really good feeling.
You gotta keep organizing after you organize. That’s the most crucial part. It was hard work getting the union, but it’s even harder work keeping it.
When we first ratified our contract, a lot of people were happy: “Cool, I got a raise!” But then when they actually got that first raise, and it ain’t really what they thought, then they’re like, “Man, y’all could’ve got more.” Like, what? You weren’t even coming to the meetings!
It’s hard. We started out with a small group of organizers. Then we became a big group—and if you stay big like that, you can really run shit. They’re really going to feel it.
Look at the Oakland teachers.2 When they went on strike, they shut shit down. We don’t have the power to do that yet. Maybe one day. But again, it’s hard to keep people organized. Especially now, as our company grows, we have new cooks coming in who don’t know the struggles that we had to go through. And in general, people don’t know much about unions.
Unions used to be a big deal back in the day. They used to be so tough, so fierce, so hard-core. And I get it. I understand why unions were so big. Because they honestly do give you that sense of power if you really listen to the message.
I heard a rumor that some of the white-collar tech workers were thinking about unionizing.
That’s crazy to me. But it shows you how wack it is out there. A lot of tech workers are like us to a certain extent.
I knew a tech worker who said she was a contractor like me.3 I didn’t even know that they had tech workers as contractors at those companies. So they feel us. They feel the pain. As I said earlier, the company would rather hire the help to get the help. It’s easier. They don’t want that liability and they don’t want to pay. Because if you’re a contractor, you don’t get those good benefits. You don’t get those perks. It’s kind of fucked-up. So now a lot of the tech workers, they’re feeling like us. And they can’t afford the houses, either, because they’re getting better money than us, but they’re not really getting enough.
I think it’s a little invasive. You know, I’m old-school. I don’t like people in my business. And I don’t care if your daughter is thirteen months and just started walking. That’s none of my business. I really could care less. You don’t have to post that on there. That’s normal to me. I went through that. I saw my son walking when he was ten months.
My son is a clown at times. He’s a teenager now, and teenagers today are more influenced by social media than they are by their parents. A person can get a million views or likes or whatnot for doing something goofy and then become famous in less than a year. My son will see that and think it could be him. But if things don’t work out, now his ass is in trouble, because he did some stupid shit.
When I was a teenager, we didn’t have dating sites. We didn’t have Snapchat and Instagram. I had a pager! I used to have to page chicks “143”—I love you, that goofy shit. Nowadays, these kids are dealing with a whole other beast.
I took his phone away recently. And he’s changing a little bit every day. He actually threw his stuff in the garbage yesterday. I was like, Wow, this is amazing. It’s working already! He’s actually putting shit in the garbage like he’s supposed to!
You ever see Demolition Man, that movie with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes? Where Snipes has blond hair?
That could be where we’re going.
The near future is gonna be hard. Really hard. We’re going to make some changes, with the help of the organizers and the unions and all of the other people that are pushing to make a change. But I worry that it’s too little, too late. I worry that it’s not going to be enough to actually help the people that need to be helped now.
A lot of people are leaving the Bay. A lot of people are leaving California. They’re moving to places where the cost of living isn’t as high, places where you can afford a house and raise a family. That’s the dream, right? You got a house, two kids, a car, and a soccer van, and you’re able to take your kids to the movies. But those other places are gonna turn into here if they make the same mistakes we made: not organizing early, not getting the communities involved early.
They’re having a celebration near here in a park for Cinco de Mayo. If it gets worse, that’s not going to be there. That’s going to be some tech holiday. It might be Bill Gates Day instead of Cinco de Mayo if things get out of hand.