High-Tech Workers, Management Strategy, and Globalization

Based on qualitative interviews with Seattle area high-tech workers, this chapter explores their positioning within and reaction to globalization processes. Looking especially as cost-cutting labor strategies of contingent employment, importation of foreign workers, and the outsourcing of professional high-tech work, it is argued that these are essentially restrictive employment strategies that benefit employers at the expense of employees. While some of the interviewees more or less approved of these practices as logical from the corporate perspective, and were confident that their jobs were too complex to be at risk, most are questioning these processes and some were actively trying to organize in an effort to halt or at least slow down such trends. How and why high-tech workers accommodate or resist management policies and practices they disagree with is analyzed with attention to the impact of ideology.