CUTTING ROOM FLOOR
The Case Before SVTC: What a Farmworker Lawsuit Taught Ted Smith About Power
When I sat down to plan our Canary Conversation with Ted Smith, one story almost became the centerpiece. It didn't make the final cut — but it's the story that explains everything that came after.
Before Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Before "clean rooms" and Superfund sites and a fifty-year career spent asking who gets to define "safe." There was a lawsuit most people have never heard of: Mandujano v. Basic Vegetable Products.
It was Ted's first case — pre-SVTC, fresh out of law school, representing cannery and farmworkers whose labor was as essential as it was invisible. There was no semiconductor industry in this story yet. No fabs, no wafers, no talk of toxic exposure in a "clean" room. Just workers, a company, and a young lawyer learning something that would define the next five decades of his life: that power imbalances don't announce themselves. Someone has to go looking for them.
That instinct — representing people who couldn't easily represent themselves — is the through-line connecting a farmworker case in the fields to a fab worker's story in Silicon Valley to the international fight over responsible technology that Ted still carries forward today through the International Campaign for Responsible Technology (ICRT). Mandujano wasn't a detour before his "real" work began. It was the first rehearsal of it.
OpenJurist -9th Circuit opinion (541 F.2d 832, decided Aug 27, 1976): Theodore G. Smith, of Smith & Johnson, San Jose, CA.
So why isn't this story the centerpiece of our Canary Conversation? Because we only had thirty minutes, and we made a choice. Canary Conversations aims to connect the past directly to what's urgent right now — and right now, that urgency lives in water: in a shrinking Colorado River, in fabs and data centers landing in drought-stricken communities, in the same deceptive language patterns Ted first recognized decades ago showing up again in new form. That's where we chose to spend our thirty minutes. Not because Mandujano matters less, but because some stories need their own room to breathe.
This is one of those stories. And it belongs here, on the cutting room floor — not because it was cut for good, but because it was cut for now.
That same instinct — representing the people whose stakes are highest and whose voices are heard least — is exactly what carried Ted from farmworkers to fab workers to today's fight over water and accountability in the AI era. Catch our full Canary Conversation with Ted next week, where we pick up that throughline decades later, in a very different industry facing a strikingly familiar problem.
🐦 Canary Question — What’s a ‘through-line’ you’ve noticed in your own career—something that connects your early experiences to the work you do now? I’d love to hear how your path unfolded.
-= Dee (still paying attention to the patterns)