Challenging the Chip
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| Author | Ted Smith, David A Sonnenfeld, and David Naguib Pellow |
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| Subject | Labor rights, environmental justice |
| Publisher | Temple University Press |
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Publication date
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2006 |
| Pages | 357 |
| ISBN | |
Challenging the Chip is a 2006 book on "labor rights and environmental justice in the global electronics industry" edited by Ted Smith, David A. Sonnenfeld, and David Naguib Pellow . It is published by Temple University Press. In three parts, the book looks at global electronics, environmental justice and labor rights, and electronic waste and extended producer responsibility. In four appendices, the book also deals with the principles of environmental justice, the computer take-back campaign, sample shareholder resolutions, and the electronics recycler's pledge of true stewardship.
This 357-page book was put together by "scores of people around the world (who) have been involved over the course of several years in the conceptualization, development, editing and production (of it)".
In his Foreword to the text, former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower makes out a case to explain how "technology happens". He writes: "Take cars. After Henry Ford began mass production, it took only a flash in time for these four-wheeled chunks of technology to wholly transform our landscape, environment, economy, culture, psychology, and ... well, pretty much our whole world. For better or worse, cars created freeways, shopping malls, McDonald's, drive-in banking -- even the Beach Boys!" Hightower argues: "A new wave of technology is sweeping the land. It is embodied in the tiny chips (and the computers they power) that are radically and rapidly transforming our world -- and, like the automobile, not always for the better."
He also contends that the story of the "dark side of the chip" needs to be "told and retold" across the "global village" before it is too late to do anything about it.
The book narrates the story of how the high-tech industry grew in the "Valley of Heart's Delight" (before the place got renamed to Silicon Valley) and how Santa Clara Valley fruit-processing workers such as Alida Hernandez got reinvented into "clean room" workers. This "deplorable pattern is still being replicated around the world".
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