It depends on what's available. If you grew up in abject poverty on a rural farm then getting a job in doors, in air conditioning, without requiring brutal, repetitive physical labor is like heaven - requiring you to work 15 hour days and 7 days a week is a small price to pay. If you grew up in a wealthy suburb, then the baseline is 40-hour weeks in the same conditions, and you have aspirations to either a) work less for the same money or b) make a lot more money. Anything else is "abusive" to you. There's something like labor arbitrage going on here...
One of the things that I found great about working with computers was that it got me away from being a few inches away from a fryer for 8-16 hours a day. Not having to deal with screaming parents, sobbing children, and people literally (yes, literally) throwing hot food at me that "had too much (whatever) on it". Instead, getting to sit in a calm quiet environment for literally something like 5x the pay, for barely 3 to 4 hours of work, was a massive improvement. Over time, I managed to get into a role that has even less customer interaction, for higher pay, and less stress. It's also in something I actually care about, too! It's really great how freeing things can be, once you start to get specialized into specific areas.
Anyway, I was kind of tripped out on how the commenter had phrased their initial comment, "people quitting left and right". I had taken to mean something like "...because of a recent change", and was wondering what it was.
The commenter made a follow up and it sounds closer to something like, "People would join and work for TSMC for a short time, then get disgusted and quit." I had assumed that there was a long-term American work force that had been floating around, but left because of something that wasn't covered in the article, and I wanted to know what that was. It sounds like that's not really what they meant.
Just to add more, TSMC hires cohorts of US college grads to move to Taiwan for training for their first (2?) years. Then they are sent to Arizona for another 2 years of work.
There are monetary incentives to complete the 4 year contract, but many (50%?) terminate their contract early while they are in Taiwan or before transferring to Arizona.
Those people are gone from the labor pool. They were a momentary artifact of class mobility that was present up to the early 90s but is no longer a thing
