As Microsoft grew, it relied more on temporary workers who were hired to work on developing one software product and were let go when the project was completed. As its temporary workforce grew, Microsoft began to see the temporary workforce as a business necessity, even as a visionary business model. During the 1990s, celebrity CEOs such as GE's Jack Walsh called for a new corporate model. Cut your permanent workforce down to the workers who are best at your basic functions. Outsource everything else to freelancers, staffing agencies, or outside contractors.

So, as the business writer G. Paschal Zachary explained, Microsoft became "the model of the new postmodern corporate culture, perfectly suited to survive in an era of rapid technological change." Microsoft became the prototype for a new corporate paradigm, with a permanent "core" of essential employees and a "periphery" of temporary workers.

In the absence of clear professional standards, Microsoft drifted into a caste system. After an interview where first impressions often trumped experience, the most promising applicants were offered permanent positions such as software developer, hard code programmer, or program manager. Other applicants often were shunted into temporary positions as software testers, and, since the software industry has no clearly defined career paths, they had few opportunities for promotions.

As Marcus Courtney, a software tester who led protests by the temp workers, explained, "The industry has a bias that there are true technical workers who belong in the industry��"and then there's everyone else whom we have to let in because the industry is expanding."

The temp workers were second-class citizens, compared to the superstars. While at work in Microsoft buildings, the temps were required to wear orange badges to distinguish them from the regular employees, who wore blue badges, and the workers for outside companies, such as the shuttle bus drivers, who wore brown badges. While temps could enjoy the free soft drinks that Microsoft offers its employees, they could not use the athletic fields or attend the annual picnic. "Some people get stock options, training, and a health club," David Larsen said. "But if you're a temporary worker for Volt, what you get is free soda."

At a company where the Internet was at least as much of a gathering place as the picnic grounds was, the temps suffered an additional indignity--"they had an a in front of their names on their @microsft.com e-mail accounts. Unlike Hester Prynne's scarlet letter, the temps' a stood for "agency employee," not "adulterer." Even more humiliatingly, many of the temps found that they weren't invited to the parties to celebrate the completion of their software projects, although, as testers, many worked longer and harder than anyone as the group effort staggered toward the finish line.

More important, though less tangible, was the feeling of being excluded from the intellectual excitement of creating software. While working as a temp, Courtney remembered walking down a hallway and hearing two software developers talking about a new product they were devising. "They saw me, and they saw my orange badge," Courtney recalled, "and they stopped talking."

"These folks just showed up at our doorstep one day," recalled Jonathan Rosenblum, an organizer for the King County Labor Council, which represents local unions in Seattle and its suburbs. "They said they had been to a number of unions, but "Nobody wants us.'"

"These folks" were temporary employees at Microsoft, and on September 26, 1997, they had come to the Labor Temple--"an old brick building in Seattle's waterfront district where many unions had their offices--"to see whether any would help them organize their coworkers. In their twenties or thirties, the three visitors plied trades that were unheard of decades ago when the Labor Temple started to display photos of unionized craft workers. Mike Blain edited technical manuals about how to use software. Heather McCrae wrote articles for Encarta, an encyclopedia that existed only on the Internet. April Grayson tested software.

Since its founding, the group had called itself the "Coordinating Committee on High-Tech Labor Issues," a difficult name to pronounce, much less remember. One day that winter, a few of the group's members were sitting around with Rosenblum, trying to come up with a catchier name. Marcus Courtney, a software tester who'd just joined the group, said, "Well, aren't we Washington State Technology Workers?" Then, either Courtney or Rosenblum asked, "Why not WashTech?" Now, the group had a name.

Over the next two months, the group began to call itself WashTech, affiliated with the Newspaper Guild and the CWA, and prepared for a public debut. Working with the King County Labor Council and with Rosenblum as an organizational guru, WashTech held six public meetings at the Labor Temple, inviting workers whose names were on its original list or who had sent e-mails protesting the changes in the overtime regulations.

Combining old-fashioned labor activism and new-fangled Internet advocacy, WashTech waited until springtime to announce that it was beginning a drive to organize tech workers in the Seattle area, starting with the temporary employees at Microsoft. The day was May 1--"the international workers holiday, which Seattle's labor radicals had celebrated at the turn of the twentieth century. WashTech's most important announcement was the launch of its Web site, the new arena for activism at the turn of the twenty-first century. On its first day, the Web site reported on the class-action lawsuit, the controversy about overtime pay for information technology workers, and WashTech's goals, which included sick pay, paid holidays, and health coverage for the temp workers.

At a news conference unveiling the Web site, Marcus Courtney explained why tech workers were taking a look at unions. "When we explored the potential of an organization like this," Courtney said, "we heard people saying, "I'm not part of a company, and I'm not part of an agency, but I want to be part of something.'"