High-Tech Betrayal: Working and Organizing on the Shop Floor

High-Tech Betrayal is the first comprehensive study of life and work in an American high-tech factory. Victor Devinatz uses both research and personal experience as a shop floor organizer to dispel the popular belief that high-tech industries offer positive employment alternatives for those seeking to escape jobs in the "declining" industries. While many believe that the "light manufacturing" work of high-tech industries is preferable to "heavy" industrial work, Devinatz attacks these misconceptions by exposing some of the myths that such work offers more promotional opportunities, requires higher skill levels, and is better paying. Devinatz demonstrates that U.S. high-tech factories of the late twentieth century are much like the industrial sweatshops of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where poorly paid workers toiled in the shadows of brutal foremen without the benefits of union protection. Devinatz argues that, instead of creating exciting work environments of the future, high-tech firms are marching boldly into the past.