FAWN ALVAREZ FAWN ALVAREZ
Fawn Alvarez, who had picked plums and stuffed envelopes for pocket money as a child, graduated from Cupertino High School in 1975. A few months after tossing her tasseled cap, she began work on the assembly line at ROLM, the company that also employed her mother and older sister Bobby. Fawn Alvarez had gotten the job on Halloween, when, dressed in Minnie Mouse gear down to the gloves, she had come by to drop off her mother’s forgotten lunch. Alvarez’s neighbor was the hiring manager, and she asked if Fawn would be interested in full-time work in production.
Alvarez had been stocking shelves and working the floor at Mervyn’s or another department store ever since she was old enough to lie convincingly about her age. She had always looked a little askance at assembly jobs, even if they were dressed up in high-tech clothes. She could have asked about a different job at ROLM, but she knew that the other obvious position for a young woman without a college degree would be as a clerk in the document control group. That group tracked the thousands of pages of documentation that ROLM generated on its products as they moved through manufacturing and into the market.
Alvarez did not want to work in document control at ROLM because her mother, who had left production work several years earlier, managed the group for the division that built ROLM’s ruggedized computer. Fawn, just past her 18th birthday and living on her own for the first time, loved her mother, but she also wanted to carve out an independent life for herself. Moreover, she was paying $100 monthly rent on her own apartment around the corner from the house her mother had bought for $22,000 shortly after joining ROLM. With that bill and others looming every month, Alvarez had to admit that a line job looked pretty good. She would make only minimum wage—$2.00 per hour—but the job came with sick leave and the promise of steady work.1 Her hours in retail varied depending on the season.
Manufacturing jobs were plentiful in Silicon Valley in the mid-1970s. Local companies were building chips, calculators, computers, peripherals, video games, and electronic equipment. In the two decades after 1964, Silicon Valley added more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs, 85 percent of which were in high tech.2 On average, experienced workers earned about $5.00 per hour. Unlike higher-level engineers or managers, even the most senior line workers did not receive stock options. A few progressive companies, ROLM among them, offered assemblers profit-sharing plans or allowed them to buy stock at a reduced price.3
Alvarez joined a production line at ROLM that built a fully electronic, computer-controlled telephone system (a private branch exchange) called CBX. The CBX was a new product for ROLM, which had sold more than $30 million worth of ruggedized computers in the six years since its founding. The company had entered this new telecommunications market shortly before Alvarez joined in 1975, seven years after the landmark Carterfone regulatory decision had forced AT&T to allow telephones and other equipment made by outside companies to be connected to the AT&T network.III ROLM’s CBX system, which had a minicomputer at its core, was cheaper and more flexible than the legacy AT&T systems with electromechanical phone switches. The ROLM CBX could also do things that once had been the task of operators: restrict certain extensions to local numbers only; identify the duration and dialed number of any call; forward, conference, and queue calls; and redial numbers automatically.4
Developing the CBX system had been a substantial technical challenge for the engineering team. The product had also created a terrifying ordeal for management and engineers alike when nearly every system began failing at customers’ offices simultaneously. (The culprit was the early Intel DRAM chip inside the system.) And the CBX had kicked off a thrilling chesslike game of strategy for ROLM’s lawyers, who successfully battled a massive AT&T effort, both in Congress and on the state level, to block ROLM and other competitors.5
Fawn Alvarez soon discovered, however, that for people on the production line, there was nothing exciting about assembling the breakthrough CBX. The room where she worked was the size of a football field, bright with fluorescent lights and ringed with large cabinets and tall racks like the ones used to cool bread in a bakery. A conveyor belt ran between two rows of desks, and it was her job to pull off it a box of green circuit boards that the woman in front of her had already loaded with electronic components. Following the engineering schematic at the front of her desk (or more likely, doing it by rote), Alvarez would then add more components, some Chiclet-sized, some the shape and heft of a Lego block. When she finished, she would put the boards back into the box and place it on the conveyor belt. A gentle push, and the box would travel on to the woman behind her. Then Alvarez would grab another box of boards.
When the last person in Alvarez’s line had put in the final parts, the boards were moved to a different conveyor belt that pulled them over a vat of solder. The solder, which flowed over a metal bar to make what looked like a tiny waterfall of silvery mercury, stuck to the metal and secured the parts in place. The boards were then washed in a chemical bath, after which workers hung them to dry like photographs in a darkroom. (“That would be so illegal now that I can’t believe I don’t have cancer,” Alvarez says.) Later, her coworkers would load the boards, key technical innards of the CBX phone system, onto the tall metal racks. Other people would test the boards off-site and install them into refrigerator-looking bays that ROLM painted a distinctive burnt orange.
When Alvarez hired on, half of ROLM’s employees worked in manufacturing, all of them in Silicon Valley.6 Alvarez describes her coworkers as “a mini United Nations.” ROLM’s rapid growth coincided with changes in the ethnic makeup of California. Many of the women who worked with Alvarez were from Mexico, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Though Alvarez heard no outright hostility, there was some sotto voce grumbling among some workers about people speaking to each other in languages other than English and about the “stinky lunches” that were being heated in the new microwave and making it hard to enjoy a brown-bagged bologna sandwich.
Alvarez quickly decided that eight consecutive hours of work she described as “plug the right piece in the right hole in the right direction” was mind-numbing. Even dipping pizza slices or pencils into the solder wave machine did little to relieve the monotony. But when one woman began asking if the others had ever considered unionizing, she was “laughed out of the room,” according to Alvarez.7 Many other production jobs in Silicon Valley ran on strict schedules and required special attire or equipment; Intel, for example, implemented its first clean room and “bunny suit” uniform in 1973. Intel workers were forbidden to wear makeup—even a wayward flake of mascara could contaminate the chips—and worked covered from head to toe in mandatory hats, goggles, long sleeves, pants, and gloves. The dress code at ROLM, on the other hand, consisted of little more than “you must wear closed-toe shoes,” Alvarez says. She and the other workers also had more control over the pace of their work, since it could take hours to add parts to all the printed circuit boards in a box.8 “It wasn’t Lucy in the chocolate factory,” she explains, referring to the classic 1952 episode of I Love Lucy in which the title character is overwhelmed by the onslaught of candies that she is supposed to wrap as they speed past her on a conveyor belt.9
A quarter century before Google included “Don’t be evil” in its code of conduct, ROLM listed “Be a great place to work” as a corporate goal alongside profits and growth. Aside from stock options, which were reserved for those cofounder Bob Maxfield calls “our most creative and top people,” every benefit or perk at ROLM was available to every employee in the company.10 Everyone could participate in generous medical and dental plans, as well as profit sharing and reduced-rate stock purchase plans. ROLM reimbursed tuition for employees attending school while working. Every permanent employee—even those on the assembly line—was entitled to a twelve-week sabbatical with full pay after six years with the company. When the executives learned that many manufacturing employees, who spent nearly all of their paychecks on food, rent, and other necessities in the increasingly expensive Silicon Valley, did not have the spare cash for even a short trip during their sabbaticals, ROLM introduced a new option: six weeks off at double pay, rather than twelve weeks at full pay.
The four ROLM founders shared a dislike of unions, which they believed fostered adversarial relationships among people who should be working together. “The way I always looked at it, any company that got unionized was doing something really, really, really wrong,” recalls Maxfield. “If you’re not treating your employees well enough so that they feel like they have to join the union and have somebody represent them to management, then management has failed.”11
There was never even a union organizing drive at ROLM. As Alvarez puts it, “We had good chairs, good lighting. We could go to the bathroom without raising our hands. We had dignity. What could we get from a union that we didn’t already have?”12
Even at Silicon Valley companies with less generous benefits or less comfortable working conditions, unions were rare. In 1974, the United Electrical Workers created an organizing committee specifically to target Silicon Valley production workers who performed highly repetitive tasks for relatively low wages, but the effort had little effect. Union organizers made significant inroads only at defense contractors, and even with those numbers factored in, fewer than 5 percent of electronics workers in the Valley were represented by a union in the 1970s.13
Union membership throughout the country dropped by 36 percent between 1972 and 1982, and organizing in Silicon Valley was further complicated by a number of local factors. As was the case on Alvarez’s line, most production workers were women, many were immigrants, and almost half were members of minority ethnic groups. None of these was characteristic of people who traditionally joined unions. It was not unusual, moreover, for workers to change employers. Alvarez’s mother, Vineta, had worked as an assembler for three different companies in her first two years in Silicon Valley. Turnover rates among Silicon Valley assembly workers topped 50 percent annually; the near-constant churn made workers difficult to organize.14 Moreover, electronics industry associations offered legal aid to companies facing unionization efforts and multiday seminars for “companies that are non-union and wish to remain so.”15 The seminars advised that the best way to keep out unions was to offer production workers benefits and compensation comparable to what they would receive with union representation. Many companies, including ROLM, did precisely that.16
After a few months on the assembly line, Alvarez decided that the work could be done better. “I had worked in retail, and I knew a lot about organizing stockrooms and how to move inventory around. I thought the way that they would do it at ROLM was crazy,” she says. Soon she was spending her breaks and lunches with the three production engineers who laid out the work flow and drew the schematics for the women on the manufacturing line. Maybe a single task needed to be broken down into two tasks, she might suggest. Why not install a ramp on rollers to make it easier to move items around the floor? Or maybe someone could scoop one more component than she was being told to grab from her supplies. “I started telling them, basically, how to make our lives easier just out of self-preservation,” she says. “I just wanted it for me.” She recalls flat-out telling an engineer that his plan for organizing the assembly work was “stupid.”II
To Alvarez’s surprise, the engineers, all college-educated men in their twenties, listened. Looking back, she guesses that they paid attention, in part, because she was spirited, attractive, and unthreatening: “tiny, cute, 18, and often not wearing a bra” is her description of herself at the time.17 They also paid attention, it seems, out of surprise. Most line workers, a generation older than Alvarez, had come of age before the women’s movement. Many did not speak fluent English. It would have been rare for someone in Alvarez’s position to question the engineers.
But Alvarez, who had protested the Vietnam War and believed Gloria Steinem was “a goddess,” was not the sort to keep quiet. She took after her mother, who had fought for every nickel and had moved from the production side of ROLM to a managerial role in document control, thanks to a deep intelligence and a personality that one admirer described as “take no prisoners and make sure things get done well and on time.”18 Fawn Alvarez had initially been a bit afraid to share her thoughts with the male engineers who were so much better educated than she was. But then she reassured herself that if the men dismissed her, she would just take her ideas directly to Ken Oshman, the cofounder whom she had met when she was a little girl.
There was one more reason why the engineers paid attention when Alvarez offered a suggestion or questioned one of their directives. She was often right, and ROLM was growing so quickly that employees adopted good ideas wherever they came from. “You didn’t have this corporate bureaucracy to help you do your job,” recalls production engineer Jeff Smith. “We had to just be bullheaded about it and get it done however we could figure out how to do it.”19 As Alvarez puts it, “I was a risk taker surrounded by other risk takers.” It was hard for the engineers to pinpoint bottlenecks or other problems simply by looking at reports or troubleshooting the line. Alvarez could help them.
One engineer suggested, for example, that the individual workers’ desks be replaced by large central tables, each with several boards on it. He described how every assembler could pick up a handful of parts and walk around the table, plugging the parts into board after board.
For eight hours, no one is going to sit down? Alvarez asked him.
He hadn’t thought of that.
One memorable day, Alvarez received a check for $1,000—the equivalent of three months’ pay—after one of her suggestions for reconfiguring the line was implemented. Soon thereafter, she was promoted to line leader.
In September 1976, around the same time Alvarez was promoted, ROLM went public. (Larry Sonsini, the young attorney with a vision for a law firm that could serve as a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs, drew up the registration statement.) Although ROLM would become a Fortune 500 company and create many millionaires among its stockholders, its IPO was a disappointment. The initial offering price of $14 per share dropped to $10 a few days later.
Not that it mattered to Alvarez. “Young and dumb,” in her own description, she put her paycheck toward rent, food, clothes, and fun. If she had any money left over, she might buy some stock at the discounted employee rate, but that rarely happened.
In 1977, she was promoted again, to manufacturing supervisor. She was twenty years old, supervising fifty women, many of them twice her age. She was responsible for hiring and firing and for helping to train new workers. At the same time, she continued to try to impress upon her own supervisor and the process engineers that she was more than just another assembler with a couple of promotions. She admits that for a while, she drove production too hard. Embracing her interpretation of Henry Ford’s mass production model, she repeated to herself, “If a person does one little thing as fast as possible, and does it over and over again, it maximizes production.” One day she overheard two assemblers referring to someone as “Little Hitler”—and then she realized that the person they were talking about was her. For the first time, she wondered if her model might just “maximize production right up until ‘person 78’ turns around and kills ‘person 77.’ ” Alvarez began varying each worker’s tasks, having people switch jobs and check one another’s work.20
The move to supervisor suited her. She was learning. She felt that her opinion was respected and she had influence. She was paid fairly. Every few Fridays, ROLM held a companywide beer bash, and she was at ease chatting with managers and executives. “Everyone mixed with everyone,” she later said.
Alvarez was also excited by the news that ROLM was about to move to a new twenty-one-acre campus in Santa Clara. The campus had a six-lane lap pool; volleyball, racquetball, and tennis courts; a fitness room, a sauna and steam room, waterfalls, a jogging trail, and ponds stocked with fish.I Goodwin Steinberg, a student of the Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, designed the headquarters building. A precursor of the elaborate amenity-filled campuses popular in Silicon Valley today, the ROLM site, now a parking lot for the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium, also housed a cafeteria with heavily subsidized lunches, which meant the battles over the microwave would disappear.
Alvarez loved ROLM, but she also felt that over the long term, manufacturing, in its repetitiveness and demand for perfect consistency, would always be a “soul-sucking job.” She wanted to leave production. But she had heard of only one woman who had left a manufacturing job for professional work: her mother. Alvarez had never asked how she had made the transition, nor did Vineta Alvarez offer any advice. (“I never told the girls how to get ahead,” says Vineta Alvarez. “They did that on their own.”)21 Fawn Alvarez was determined to repeat her mother’s success. “I wanted an office job,” she says. “I didn’t care where I landed; I just needed to land behind a desk.”22
I. Alvarez recalls that since the new buildings were surrounded by fields, in the earliest days, mice overran the campus. “You could hear screams all day long coming out of these beautiful offices,” she says. Soon the employees were throwing the poor rodents into the pond and betting on whether the mice could make it out before one of the fish ate them. She explains, “Nobody wanted to kill the mouse, but no one cared much if the bass got it.”
II. When Ron Raffensperger, Alvarez’s boss later in her career, heard that, even at eighteen, she had been telling higher-ups that their ideas were stupid, he started laughing. “That’s Fawn, all right.”
III. The Carterfone decision opened the way for answering machines, voice mail systems, and other such equipment. Before Carterfone, AT&T, which since 1908 had used the motto “One system, one company,” had not only owned the phone lines but also built and rented every phone connected to the system. ROLM cofounder Bob Maxfield likened the old way to being required to rent lamps and lightbulbs from the electric utility company.