PIA Designs New Web Site for C. Virginia Fields
President of The Borough of Manhattan

August 10, 2001:  Progressive Internet has designed and launched a new web presence for C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan Borough President.  Our effort included creating a new, professional look, adding interactive forms and community communication features to attract new voters, serve her existing constituents, and inspire greater involvement in her programs.

PIA to Partner with Visual Insights, Inc. 

November 22, 2000:  PIA is pleased to announce its new partnership agreement with Visual Insights, Inc., "the ebusiness performance company".  VI's patented 3-D graphical display engines and real-time server log processing enable real-time analysis of traffic flows, visitor interactions, promotional effectiveness, etc., using powerful 3-D visual displays to enhance recognition and comprehension.  

Under this agreement, PIA will promote and sell VI's award-winning eBizinsights web site analysis tools, and provide consulting and custom development services for VI's and PIA's clients.  For Visual Insights' press release , click here.

Navy Yard Film Studio Launched!

March 14, 2000:  The Brooklyn Navy Yard Film Studio development deal is consummated at last, sans DiNiro and Miramax!  Steiner Equities to build 15 acre complex.  PIA expects role in integrating the high speed networking for the high-flying project.  See our company backgrounder.

Newhouse News Service Quotes PIA EVP!

Dateline: 3/8/2000 Newhouse News Service http://www.newhousenews.com

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CYBER-UNION 
Unions Face Legal, Cultural Hurdles in Organizing Cyberworkers 

SAN JOSE, Calif. The closest Robert Waters can get to the industry he served for almost three decades is an $8-an-hour job manhandling boxes, desks and file cabinets for a moving company that provides muscle for the giants of Silicon Valley, outfits like Intel and Sun Microsystems. 

In the '70s and '80s, Waters was a hired gun for the old guard, Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment, advising clients on computer needs for the massive manufacturing projects of those times. He drove a Corvette and raced British sports cars. 

Now 52, he's homeless, divorced and forced to scramble for a cot at a local shelter every night. You'd think he'd be bitter about an industry that burns up talent at an amazing rate, that ignores the older workers it deems unable to keep its long hours and meet its demand for the absolute latest in cutting-edge skills. You'd think his downwardly mobile experience would radicalize him, making him a prime target for a union organizer. 

You'd be wrong. 

Waters still has techno-lust, an obsessive desire to fool around with computers and push them as far as they can go. He still dreams his start-up dreams.  "You leave me alone with a computer for a few hours and I'll make it do something," he said. 

And that's bad news for unions eyeing America's growing numbers of information technology workers. If a long-scorned techie like Waters still believes in the entrepreneurial independence of the computer industry, what chance do unions have with younger workers in the throes of dot-com fever, stock options, IPOs and the biggest gold rush to hit the Left Coast since 1849?

The short answer: none. At least not in Silicon Valley. Not with all this venture capital flooding in, floating all forms of high-tech projects, both the good and the bad, giving everybody a chance to be what Regis Philbin promises - you can be a millionaire. 

Despite a high-profile AFL-CIO pilot project and high-energy talk from its top organizer, Amy Dean, about the need to lasso workers from outside labor's traditional sphere, no union is working the high-skill end of Silicon Valley, said Robert Brownstein, policy director with Working Partnerships, U.S.A., a labor think tank based in San Jose. 

Instead, Dean's South Bay Labor Council works the low-tech margins, developing a model for organizing clerical temps and other contract labor at high-tech firms that outsource every form of work not directly related to technology.  "We're not trying to organize in areas where we don't have leverage, and we just don't have leverage with those workers," Dean said of the high-skill end. 

This is not to say that unions aren't hungry to reverse decades of declining enrollment. Membership has dropped to the lowest level since the Great Depression, from 17.7 million workers in 1983 to 16.2 million in 1998, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More telling is the precipitous decline in labor's share of the private sector, from 16.5 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 9.5 percent in 1998, reflecting a shift in the American economy away from smokestacks and regimented factory workers. 

Organizers like Dean are well aware that two of the economy's fastest growing zones are service and technology. But while unions have succeeded with service sector types such as janitors and hotel employees, they have been less successful with the quasi-professionals of information technology. 

Still, there are toeholds of high-tech disgruntlement. ``Just because you're a knowledge worker doesn't mean you're liberated from the inhuman treatment of the workplace,'' said Dean. 

In fact, experts say there is a growing constituency of techies who are getting cut out of the industry's golden rewards. For every 20-something wunderkind expecting millions from the initial stock offering of a start-up and working killer hours to make that happen, there is a highly skilled contract worker at Microsoft angry about being paid less and having fewer benefits than a full-time employee. 

What's more, some software programmers and network administrators toil at a bank or hospital, where the cult of technology isn't so strong and stock options may not be standard. Or they work at a manufacturing concern with a strong union presence, perhaps an aerospace company like the Boeing Co., where 17,000 engineers, software programmers and other white collar technical workers are striking for higher wages and benefits. 

Unions have a shot at organizing high-tech workers wherever their skills are marginalized by corporate bureaucracy and wherever the turbulence and insecurity of the industry isn't offset by the promise of creative freedom and monetary reward, said Trevor Bain, professor of management at the University of Alabama. 

Such organizing is part of a larger trend of professionals such as doctors and scientists seeking union representation, said Michael Belzer, assistant professor of labor-management relations at the University of Michigan. At issue for these non-traditional recruits is workplace insecurity; doctors, for instance, turned to unions after they lost control of medicine to health maintenance organizations.

Successful efforts among professionals would be a back-to-the-future move for unions that got their start at the turn of the last century representing the skilled, highly mobile workers of that era - carpenters, masons and other craftsmen.

"These information technology jobs are the new crafts, the same as the crafts of the 1890s where the skills that you have are in your toolbox that moves with you as you move through your working life," said Bain. "These are people who depend on what they know to land them a new job when the last job dies out. It's a world of constantly building up your skills and keeping them pretty sharp, right?"

But to win these 21st Century craftsmen, unions must overcome legal and cultural hurdles, particularly among the cowboys of cyberspace with their celebration of technological independence, elegant innovation and stock in the companies that employ them. 

This is doubly true at start-ups and smaller companies like the Sentius Corp., a Palo Alto software outfit that has developed a program to provide pop-up definitions in six languages for documents it scans. 

"The small companies in this industry are all about freedom, creativity and a big upside Ä equity in the company," said Marc Bookman, 37, Sentius' president and chief executive officer.  "And if you've got equity, you've already got a union and a say in the company." 

Think of the required leap as an image problem: Palm Pilot jockeys don't like windbreakers, white socks and the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa. 

"It's hard to underestimate the cultural hurdle that labor faces and the cultural skepticism unions face,'' said David Larson, director of the Dispute Resolution Institute at Hamline University's School of Law in St. Paul, Minn.  "To succeed, unions have to distance themselves from their own stereotype."

Mention unions to a Silicon Valley cyberworker and you'll get a reaction that brings to mind Gloria Steinhem's old line about women needing men about as much as a fish needs a bicycle. 

"A union doesn't make sense here," said Peter Merholz, 27, creative director for epinions, inc., a Mountain View, Calif., start-up that is sort of an online Consumer Reports, where product reviews are generated and ranked by subscribers to the service. 

"We're creating types of careers here that didn't exist before. We're creating job titles to handle responsibilities that didn't exist before. This community thrives on entrepreneurial spirit and it emphasizes change and flexibility," Merholz said. "The minute you fix something in place like a union would do, you hamper your creativity and flexibility."

But for an older worker like Ginny Rohrerbaugh, 49, who served IBM, Big Blue, for 19 years, a union was the only fitting response to the company's decision to water down its pension plan, busting the unwritten social contract between employees and the company. 

"I'm not for a full-blown union, but in this country, the only way you can organize into something management has to deal with is to form a union," she said. 

Rohrerbaugh was part of an employee organizing effort that fell short of a collective bargaining unit, but did help convince IBM to restore the old benefit package to workers 40 years or older with a decade of service. Now she works for a smaller company in Austin, Tex. The pay is better, but more important to Rohrerbaugh is the creative freedom and lack of bureaucratic noise. 

"If you're satisfied with your job, you don't mind staying that extra hour or two to get something done," she said.  "But that's different from being afraid that if you don't stay that extra hour, your boss will accuse you of not being a team player." 

For Marcus Courtney, 29, working two years as a contract employee at Microsoft meant all of the pressure to perform as a full-time employee, but at a lower salary, with fewer benefits - no stock options, no 401-K. Courtney was a test engineer, one of the infamous, orange-badged "Microserfs," virtual full-timers who spent all their work days under the roof that Bill Gates built, but who officially worked for employment agencies that contracted with the software giant. 

Tired of being a self-described "second-class citizen," Courtney left Microsoft to organize contract employees. He co-founded the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, WashTech for short, an affiliate of the Communication Workers of America. And although WashTech has yet to achieve bargaining unit status with Microsoft, it has had an impact. Employment agencies have fattened "Microserf" salaries and benefit packages. 

"There's a perception out there that workers in this industry aren't interested in being represented - that's another myth," said Courtney.  "These workers are on the ground floor of the technology that is radically changing the workplace, yet we have no say over the conditions of our own workplace."

And then there's the gold rush. 

The dazzle of dollars and the fables of IPO riches that have made millionaires out of receptionists and software programmers alike makes workers even more willing to sign up for a Faustian deal that gives them little life outside of work that may or may not lead to a big payoff. The deluge of venture capital has created a Roaring Twenties sense of endless possibilities.  From Silicon Valley to New York's Silicon Alley, there is an air of privilege and a sense of exemption from cold capitalistic forces.  

"There's a Silicon Alley kind of reality, where people buy into that Internet fantasy of becoming the next Bill Gates or Scott McNeely," said Dick Jones, a New York-based Web designer who is heavily involved in union efforts to organize the workers of cyberspace. "Programmers as a type all believe they will be taken care of because they are good and talented. They all believe they are good and talented and indispensible." 

And the cash cascade has added greed and power to the industry's traditional obsession with technological innovation.

"What causes me to cringe is the Wild West mentality," said Rachel Cohen, a talent advocate at Muses Inc., a San Francisco recruiting agency that specializes in creative talent like Web designers and graphic artists. ``The gold rush creates this societal value on the Internet for cash, not the idea that the Internet is intrinsically good."  

When the bubble bursts, the killer pace and carnage of burned-out talent will become manifestly apparent, experts predict. So will the vulnerability of workers who once thought they were bulletproof in the global economy. 

"Most Americans don't realize how vulnerable they are at the workplace,'' said Larson at Hamline.  "If you want to organize workers in the Silicon Valley, you have to sell it as protection. You don't want to shut people down and limit what they do. You have to say, `Do you really think that people can't do what you're doing for a dollar a day? Maybe they can't do it now, but they will in five years, and you won't be retired in five years.' '' 

Organizers like Dean know the old industrial model of shop stewards and grievance committees won't work in fast-paced industries where the line between labor and management is blurred or non-existent. 

Guilds and professional associations are an option. They have the advantage of not being saddled with the union stereotype while still bringing forth the collective concerns of their members. But they lack the legal clout of a union's collective bargaining unit, which brings to the negotiating table a set of rights recognized under American labor law, said Belzer. 

None of this matters much to Waters, the San Jose outcast. 

He hasn't had a steady computer job in more than five years, and hopes a crash course in network administration, sponsored by Cisco Systems and the city's Emergency Housing Consortium, gives him the credentials he needs to re-enter the industry. 

Technology has marked him with a brand that is soul deep.  "I love the industry,'' Waters said.  "I just love it. The way it treats people coming up, I love it. They're treated like they're special, they dress the way they want, they're allowed to flourish and fly, they're judged by the work they produce. I've seen all this stuff grow up. I don't know, it's just a part of me. And how can you hate a part of you?"

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