Silicon Valley = Toxic Valley

So, I was talking to my friend the other day and we were talking about civil rights and discrimination. Y'know, normal chit chat, and she told me about the workers in Silicon Valley. These aren't the programmers or the engineers or the normal people you associate in working with technology. These are the people that put together the products.

These are the people that deal with a lot of the toxic materials. They put together the components in the computers. I've known that computers are made using very toxic chemicals, but I guess I always assumed that because of such toxic environments, either the factories were overseas, or were done in very carefully controlled clean settings.

Unfortunately, I did end up assuming the factories over seas are not clean and safe. Which ends up being the norm, with the human rights violations in south east Asia. However, thats a whole other situation. This is more about the human rights violations that are happening directly under our noses that are kept from the public eye.

Most of these people are Asian or Hispanic women, because of the stereotype that they have small, nimble fingers (Park And Pellow, pp. 47).

Unfortunately I haven't found an online source for this article, its called Making The Invisible Visible: Asian American/Pacific Islander Workers in Silicon Valley and can probably find it at your local library

Overall, this is an unfortunately hidden dangerous practice that needs to be brought to light. Even searching online for information on this was a chore, and normally the internet is rife with information that doesn't make it into mainstream media. This is because of watchdog groups, and there really is little to know control over what you can put online.