Guadalupe Herrera puts in more than her share of late nights at Cisco Systems (CSCO), but don't count her among that company's paper millionaires. For the past 14 months, Herrera has worked from 6:00 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. emptying the trash, cleaning the latrines and wiping down the work areas of the senior programmers who are paid a starting salary somewhere between $100,000 and $125,000. Herrera, by contrast, makes less than $17,000 a year. That's the top pay for janitors at even the most cash-rich of the Valley's technology companies, no options or retirement benefits included.
Silicon Valley has created more than its share of stock-option millionaires, but it's also given rise to people like Guadalupe Herrera and Laura Arreola, a janitor at 3Com (COMS). Arreola lives in a converted garage with her husband, her brother and two children. All three adults work. They show the flip side of the Valley's boom. The disparity has been there since the beginning, but despite all the talk of bridging the digital divide, the gap continues to widen, even within the halls of the Internet Economy's shining stars.
Here, housing is the most expensive in the country. There's so much venture money floating around the Valley that the pundit Paul Saffo once joked that there are "not enough rat holes to stuff it down." Yet at the same time, the Valley garage, once the symbol of the startup spirit that gave rise to the tech boom, suggests a deeper, less romantic reality. In 1999, Cisco CEO John Chambers was compensated at a rate - including the options he exercised - that was 7,176 times that of Guadalupe Herrera's pay. Chambers lives in a pink stucco palace high up in Los Altos Hills, and Herrera is one of four people living in a drafty, musty garage in a San Jose neighborhood known for its gangs. Where it was once the perfect low-cost lab for banging out prototypes, the garage is now the best housing that janitors can afford.
Herrera, 30, is a sad-faced woman with beefy arms and a heavy brow that seems frozen in a constant state of worry. Herrera braces every time the phone rings, fearing it's someone from the collection agency that has been hounding her ever since one of her two children fell seriously ill. Her partner holds a full-time job as a janitor in a nursing home. Yet when the car they share broke down, Herrera was forced to work a second job at Kmart (KM) for six months while her partner picked up extra work as a day laborer so they'd have enough money to buy a slightly newer used car.
"I'm one of the lucky ones," the Mexican-born Herrera says through a translator. "Most of the other janitors I know at Cisco work second jobs full-time. They get home at 3 a.m., get a few hours' sleep, then get up to clean homes, work as maids at a hotel, clean windows, work as a busboy. Any work they can find."
Most of the Valley's janitors are Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico or other points south. Some janitors commute from as far away as Stockton, Calif., two hours to the east. According to a survey by the Service Employees International Union, the children of nearly 1 in every 3 janitors must sleep in the living room. Nearly 40 percent rent out a portion of their apartment to friends, families or strangers. Many must make the Hobbesian choice of living in substandard conditions or working a second full-time job - if not both.
Yolanda Marquez is a mother of four, and a janitor at Hewlett-Packard (HWP) who also works a full-time day job as a maid at a downtown San Jose hotel. To make ends meet, she also rents out one of the bedrooms in her two-bedroom apartment.
"It's not so bad," Marquez says. "Until a year or two ago, we all slept in the living room and I rented out both bedrooms." Her parents live in one of the bedrooms, and a family of three lives in the other. That means 10 people share a single bathroom, and three families take turns in the kitchen.
