Piecework lawsuit settled claims over man’s home assembly of electronics 

By K. Oanh Ha
STAFF WRITER SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS  

11/14/00 San Jose, CA—A former electronics pieceworker who said he was paid as little as $1 an hour to assemble electronic products at home has settled his lawsuit with a Silicon Valley high-tech company—the first-ever suit challenging the deep-rooted practice of electronic home assembly.

Under the sealed settlement, in which the company admitted no wrongdoing, San-Jose based Top Line Electronics, whose workers have assembled products for brand-name giants such as 3Com Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp., agreed to cease all industrial homework and to comply with health and safety laws, said attorneys for the worker, Kamsan Mao. Mao will receive back pay for the work he did at home assembling power supplies and other computer components while employed full-time at Top Line.

Mao’s lawyers said the settlement sends an important message to the industry, which has been employing immigrants for home assembly at piece-rate wages for the last 20 years.

“The high-tech industry is really being built on the backs of these immigrant workers. And they can’t exploit these immigrants anymore,” said Doris Ng, staff attorney of non-profit Equal Rights Advocates, who filed the original suit in December 1999 in federal court, along with Asian Law Caucus on Mao’s behalf. “The electronic manufacturing industry needs to know there are groups that are watching. They can’t depend on workers who can’t complain anymore.”

An attorney for Top Line, Carolyn Knox, said the company “denies any and all liabilities for every allegation of the complaint.”

“Just because we agree not to violate (industrial home work laws) doesn’t mean we’ve ever violated it,” Knox said. “Top Line doesn’t employ pieceworkers. We never have.”

Mao, a Cambodian immigrant living in San Jose, was one of dozens of pieceworkers the Mercury News interviewed for an investigative series that ran last July detailing that networks of predominantly Asian immigrants have been assembling printed circuit boards and cables at home for as little as a penny per component—for some of high tech’s major companies. The Mercury News found that at least 14 local electronics manufacturers—which contract to build products for companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc.—have engaged in piecework, some as recently as last year.

The work, which took place in workers’ kitchens, living rooms and garages, often involved whole families, including children. Workers routinely used toxic chemicals without protection or supervision. Nearly all home assemblers were paid no overtime and many did not earn even minimum wage—in violation of state and federal labor laws.

The Mercury News series sparked a joint state and federal investigation of 25 high-tech companies. So far, four local companies have been ordered to pay $284,500 in back wages to workers. Federal investigators also examined Top Line but could not find any violations since August 1999, the beginning period investigators were allowed to probe because of the statute of limitations.

California Labor Commissioner Art Lujan has pledged to redirect five state labor investigators to focus primarily on Silicon Valley.

Mao, 33, worked for Top Line as a full-time employee at its manufacturing facility for six years until 1998. Mao says the company forced him to take home additional work to do at night and on weekends in his home on a paid-by-the-piece rate rather than an hourly wage. He says he was paid between $1 and $5 per piece and each piece took at least an hour to complete.

Mao said he also developed a variety of health problems, including asthma, from the work. In July 1998, Top Line laid Mao off.

Lite-On Inc. of Milpitas, which contracted with Top Line for the power supply repairs, was originally named in the suit as a joint employer. A Lite-On attorney said the company was dropped from the suit as part of the settlement and did not make any settlement payments to Mao.

Lawyers for Mao had originally hoped to turn the lawsuit into a class-action suit. But they found that other pieceworkers—even Mao’s fellow workers at Top Line—were often reluctant to come forward for fear they would lose their jobs and that they often did not understand that labor laws were being broken.

“These are low-income folks who are earning very low wages and who depend on this work to survive,” said Ng of Equal Rights Advocates. “The possibility of losing their job and not having a paycheck is something they can’t risk.”

Read past articles from when the lawsuit was filed:

San Jose Mercury News
Asian Week
SF Bay Guardian