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Digital divide activists argue that differences in access to technology and technical skills based on race, class, gender, and geographic location socially and economically disempower those (individuals or countries) on the wrong side of the tracks, or wires, as it were. But this argument may frustrate the elimination of such inequalities by overlooking disparities that constitute another digital divide?that within the digital workforce. This paper argues that policymakers and academics engaged in the "digital divide debate" have overlooked crucial problems within the high tech labor market. After all, access to and skill in computer technology are meaningless without secure, full-time, living wage jobs for the trained and wired. But we can unleash the democratizing potential of digital divide research and activism by focusing on wider socio-economic disparities that the digital divide ? as currently constructed?stands in for. The work of WashTech (the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers), the Seattle-based union for IT workers, provides our conversation with a revised outline of the concerns that must be addressed if we are truly to empower workers who toil in the borderlands of promised economic success and the reality of increasing insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]