> “The reality for people from Taiwan is that they are doing even more than 12-hour days often,” said the American engineer on Glassdoor. “There’s also the night shifts and weekend shifts on duty and/or on call.”
>“Sure, TSMC might allow a reasonable expression of opinion [on work-related matters]—but only from an engineer or deputy manager to the department manager,” Joey, who has worked as a 5-nanometer chip engineer for TSMC in Taiwan for nearly six years, told Fortune. “It’s impossible for managers to express their opinions to upper-level management. This simply cannot be done,” Joey said. (He asked to be identified only by his nickname due to fear of reprisals.)
> [...]
> “Our salary is only [for] 10 hours [a day], [but] we don’t leave until we’re done. And we’ve never been willing to report it,” a member of a private 85,000-person Facebook group for current and former employees of TSMC in Taiwan wrote in February.
This doesn't sound like it's only a wage problem. This sound like TSMC trying to use a work culture that just doesn't mesh with what Americans are willing to tolerate.
Pay high enough and people will tolerate everything that you describe.
Just imagine if every chip assembly worker made 500K/year - would they care that upper management isn't listening? No, they wouldn't. Would they be okay with 12h/day? A lot of people absolutely would.
The problem is rock bottom pay for rock bottom work environment.
While I completely agree, there might be something else, i.e. the elephant in the room. While having TSMC factories in the USA is great for everyone, it's not ideal for Taiwan as a state. Therefore it's in the best interest of Taiwan to prolong the current situation where the whole world depends on TSMC factories located in Taiwan, and not anywhere else.
TSMC Taiwan is keeping their leading-edge nodes in Taiwan with a 3-4 year delay, which appeased the Taiwanese public/officials.
The bigger issue is that China might catch up to TSMC USA fabrication by the time that they actually start fabbing due to all these delays and China will have a superior chip capacity, making the defense aspect completely moot.
Big tech all had employees working 10-16h days in the beginning. Even now, software startups are working their employees hard. If Americans aren't willing to work extra hard, we're heading towards what happening in Europe (negative GDP growth, increasing wealth gap, high youth unemployment).
> “The reality for people from Taiwan is that they are doing even more than 12-hour days often,” said the American engineer on Glassdoor. “There’s also the night shifts and weekend shifts on duty and/or on call.”
- https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-arizona-culture-clash/
>“Sure, TSMC might allow a reasonable expression of opinion [on work-related matters]—but only from an engineer or deputy manager to the department manager,” Joey, who has worked as a 5-nanometer chip engineer for TSMC in Taiwan for nearly six years, told Fortune. “It’s impossible for managers to express their opinions to upper-level management. This simply cannot be done,” Joey said. (He asked to be identified only by his nickname due to fear of reprisals.)
> [...]
> “Our salary is only [for] 10 hours [a day], [but] we don’t leave until we’re done. And we’ve never been willing to report it,” a member of a private 85,000-person Facebook group for current and former employees of TSMC in Taiwan wrote in February.
- https://fortune.com/2023/06/03/tsmc-arizona-plant-jobs-salar...
This doesn't sound like it's only a wage problem. This sound like TSMC trying to use a work culture that just doesn't mesh with what Americans are willing to tolerate.