Plugging into a network of relatives and friends, the family takes on extra work assembling boards at home to help make ends meet. Tong, the maintenance officer of an engineering battalion during the Vietnam War, taught himself to use a computer by reading an English manual with the help of a dictionary. He's enamored of the high-tech world and is studying for a computer science degree from Evergreen Community College. As recent immigrants unfamiliar with labor laws, family members have no sense that their home work may be problematic. They work communally, making it difficult to calculate whether anyone earns the minimum wage.
Children participate, regardless of laws against child labor.
A penny per transistor For this job, which different family members will work on at various times over a two-day period, the family will get paid one penny for each transistor loaded. Seven of the boards take 1,500 transistors each, the remaining three take 2,380 transistors each. Earlier in the afternoon, Tong picked up the boards from Adaptive Electronics, a division of VIKO Technology Inc. in San Jose, where his older brother works as a technician. It's a rush job and Tong has promised he will have it done by the next day. It's almost 9 p.m. and several boards are only partly done.