Barbara Kempf is a highly qualified computer indexer with one of the world's most successful companies. Yet, once a year, she expects to lose her relatively well-paid job and to find herself unable to pay her health insurance premiums.
Kempf is one of thousands of temporary workers at Microsoft, the software group which has created three of the world's four richest men. Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a new employment policy under which all temporary staff had to leave after a year. The plan followed criticism of the company's use of "permatemps", employees kept on contract for years without benefits.
The new policy has done little to stop complaints from Kempf and others. "There's a very unrealistic view held by people outside about what it's like to work at Microsoft," she says. "They don't realise that, while those at the top are making lots of money, those at the bottom are barely surviving, with very insecure jobs."
Several employees launched a legal crusade against Microsoft, which resulted in a $97m settlement from the company last week. But many others, including Kempf, took a more unusual step: they joined a trade union.
Unions, as outdated as spats and prohibition for decades, are enjoying something of a renaissance in America, in some of the most unlikely industries. Organised labour, with its notions of collective bargaining and standard work hours, has long been anathema to the entrepreneurial hi-tech industry. Yet there are signs that this attitude may be softening.
In recent weeks, organisers at Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, have launched campaigns against mandatory overtime and the high cost of benefits. Customer service representatives at eTown, an online electronics retailer, have meanwhile filed what is thought to be the first application to hold a workplace union ballot at a dot.com company. The unionisation drive came days before the company decided to sack 25% of its workforce.
Marcus Courtney, co-founder of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, says these campaigns "end the myth that unions are irrelevant in the 21st century".
Official figures collected by the US labour department suggest that unions have managed to salvage a semblance of relevance over the past two years. Membership rose by 265,000 last year, the biggest net increase in 20 years. While this was partly a result of a bigger workforce - with unemployment at record lows - the actual percentage of workers in a union remained steady at 13.9%, reversing years of decline. In the first six months of this year, the number of workplace ballots won by unions rose to more than half.
These limited successes are not a result of increasing organisation at hi-tech firms. What the latest developments at hi-tech firms have done is raised awareness about and added confidence to American trade unions. Workers not traditionally associated with unions - including janitors, doctors and university teaching assistants - have all taken industrial action in the past year.
John Budd, associate professor at the University of Minnesota's industrial relations centre, describes unionisation efforts at hi-tech firms as "cannon balls being fired over the bows" of corporate America. Lance Compa, a labour law professor at Cornell University, sees the history of industrial organisation as cyclical , with the mid-1990s as rock bottom. "I think we are starting to see the turn of the cycle again," he says.
The question remains why the cycle is turning now. The unprecedented economic prosperity of the past decade has helped in part as low unemployment has given workers greater confidence in their ability to push for higher wages and benefits. However, recent signs of a downturn have prompted the hi-tech campaigns as workers object to job cuts. Employees at Amazon and other once-mighty internet companies were happier contemplating arduous hours and no holiday entitlement when their share options were worth more than the paper they were printed on.
Other reasons given by academics for the increased union activity range from the widening disparity between the haves and the have-not-as-muches to a sense of unease and uncertainty in the age of big business. Professor Compa believes that there is also a "fundamental need among people involved in a common purpose to associate with each other and come together to assert their rights".
Others point to the new leadership at the AFL-CIO, the trade union umbrella group. Under the presidency of John Sweeney, elected five years ago, it has launched aggressive recruitment drives in an attempt to become more relevant to today's workforce.
It remains to be seen whether the gains prove sustainable if the US economy takes a turn for the worse. Optimists such as Marcus Courtney at Washtech believe that it will, if only because of the injustices of today's America. "It seemed ridiculous to me to work in the most successful, profitable industry on the planet and not have healthcare," he says. His view is winning more and more converts in America.
Jane Martinson is the Guardian's Wall Street correspondent
