Union Organizing High-Tech Companies Such

Union Organizing

High-tech companies such as Microsoft have no desire to support unionization of their employees. In fact, they are doing everything they can to promote lower wages and less job security at their companies, the very two major benefits that unions seek for workers. With considerable market power and a labor force resistant to unions, all the cards are in Microsoft's favor for continuing its endeavor for cheap, dispensable labor.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is one of the leading supporter in the fight for infinite H-1B guest worker visas (Broache, 2007). At a recent Congressional hearing in March, 2008, Gates said there's only one way to solve a "crisis"-level shortage of qualified scientific talent in the United States, "Open our doors to highly talented scientists and engineers who want to live, work and pay taxes here. (cited in Broache, 2007)." The true motivations behind Microsoft's endoresement of the H-1B guest workers lie in its desire to bring in foreign workers at lower pay rates than it can obtain from American workers.

At the same time Microsoft is courting the importation of labor to reduce costs, it is a strong advocate of outsourcing to achieve the same objective. Various outsourcing presentations by Microsoft senior executives (Microsof'ts Indian outsourcing documents) make it clear that the company just wants cheap labor as evidenced by statements such as "quality work at 50-60% of the cost," "2 heads for the price of one" and "leverage the Indian economy's lower cost structure." Increasingly, its obvious that Microsoft's outsourcing is not just for noncritical work as it has publicly claimed. Leaked documents reveal that the company is outsourcing to Indian companies high-level jobs in software architecture and development (Bishop, 2004).

Meanwhile, Microsoft's compensation to employees isn't keeping up with the cost of living in this country across many of its positions (Bishop, 2006). Minimum, midpoint and maximum compensation guidelines at Microsoft have remained unchanged between 2004 and 2006 for eight of its twenty-one salary categories, at the lowest end of the pay scale. In other categories, many of the increases have been below three percent. In the Seattle area, where Microsoft has a large presence, salaries fell by about two percent during this time.

Microsoft has tremendous advantages in preventing unionization with little help in site for its employees. In its fight for H-1B visas, all it has to do is threaten to ship the work overseas if it doesn't get its way. The only real constraint on outsourcing is the availability of skilled labor overseas. but, perhaps the biggest advantage Microsoft has is the reluctance of high-tech workers themselves to unionize as explained by Millard (2004). Certainly, the threat of outsourcing and layoffs has intimidated many workers. Still, high-tech workers have long associated unions with blue-collar workers. and, high-tech workers tend to change jobs often, meaning that job security isn't as important as it is in other industries. In the long-term, job scarcity may lead to large enough dissatisfaction to finally persuade high-tech workers that unionization is in their best interests.