Educational Media Reviews Online

This oddly titled documentary/exposé follows the lives of two less privileged members of Silicon Valley society working and toiling in poverty-ridden downtown East Palo Alto, California. They are far from the high-tech company sites extolled as ideal workplaces, harbingers of the glorious high-tech future that boast the kind of worker amenities (exercise rooms, child-care, organic-food cafeterias, ergonomic desks, eye-pleasing environments, etc.) that we have all read about in newspapers and magazines and seen profiled on television.

Raj Jayadev, an earnest young man of Indian-American descent, works on a Hewlett-Packard assembly line in East Palo Alto. His is an entry-level, low-paying job, with long hours, dictatorial supervisors, and little job satisfaction. Raj is not the kind of employee that factories are keen to have among other employees. He's smart and not about to be pushed around by anyone. When he discovers discrepancies in his paycheck - more hours worked than compensation for those hours - he follows through and gets the money owed him. He tells his co-workers they have the right to do the same. When he serves on a committee actively pursuing employee health problems, he soon finds himself kicked off the committee. The factory doesn't want to know that employees have been affected with chronic respiratory problems and that they are concerned about their safety as they handle potentially carcinogenic computer components. Raj is eventually laid off, but successfully sues for wrongful termination. His future in Silicon Valley? Not very likely.

Interspersed with Raj's travails on the assembly line is the story of Plugged-In, a not-for-profit East Palo Alto storefront organization that seeks to foster and promote computer skills for minority children and adults. Magda Escobar, who heads this group, is aggressive, determined, and savvy about dealing with corporate sponsors. When she is told she has to move from downtown ("urban removal" as Palo Alto expands), she goes after these same corporate sponsors and wangles a new home for Plugged-In. At the groundbreaking ceremony for her organization's new location, no less than Carly Fiorina (CEO of Hewlett-Packard), not to mention Andrew Cuomo (then HUD Secretary), and Bill Clinton, (then President of the United States), attend. Escobar's a winner in the corporate/not-for-profit game. She knows what she has to do to get what she wants; she is no shrinking violet but a well educated, goal-oriented young woman who clearly has a future in Silicon Valley.

What do these two young people, and these two stories, have to do with each other? It is puzzling. As is the entire opening sequence, which deals with an annual soapbox derby. It is lively, colorful, introduces the viewer to Magda Escobar, giving a taste of the Valley's corporate culture, but it goes on too long and seems part of an altogether different film.

The inside look at the HP assembly line is fascinating and unearths "secrets" that HP would probably rather keep to its corporate self - that workers are not treated terribly well, health issues are ignored to an alarming degree, that minorities are perhaps taken advantage of, supervisors can often be less than kind and that the environment does not tolerate or encourage activists, i.e., "trouble-makers". The story of Plugged-In, a corporation that views itself as being on the cutting-edge of good, fair, even exemplary treatment for all employees, has nothing to do with the HP story, except perhaps to indicate that lip service to minorities is just that. That is, that funding non-profit groups that benefit minorities is a nice, safe, non-threatening way for companies to show how enlightened they are, and how bountiful, but that providing living wages and safe, healthy work environment for minority employees on the assembly line, for the people who put in the long, tiring hours to package the goods in a fast and efficient manner, thereby guaranteeing maximum profit and maintaining high stock prices, is another issue entirely.

Secrets Of Silicon Valley, however, is fascinating, and extremely valuable for its look at the not-so-pretty side, the dark side of that high-tech paradise called Silicon Valley (i.e., just letting people know that not everyone there is a dot.com millionaire - far, far from it - is important to understand). It could benefit from a stronger narrative meshing the two stories better. The viewer has to do a lot of work to assemble what the filmmakers are trying to say, unnecessary work, in the opinion of this reviewer. Technically, the documentary is well-shot and the camera work is excellent. The producers are to be commended for tackling this issue at all but Secrets of Silicon Valley might be better titled to reflect something that would have conveyed the filmmakers' intent more clearly to the potential viewing audience.

Recommended primarily for upper-level high school (Juniors and Seniors), college, and adult audiences.