Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of the world’s largest advanced computer chip manufacturers, continues finding its efforts to get its Arizona facility up and running to be more difficult than it anticipated. The chip maker’s 5nm wafer fab was supposed to go online in 2024 but has faced numerous setbacks and now isn’t expected to begin production until 2025. The trouble the semiconductor has been facing boils down to a key difference between Taiwan and the U.S.: workplace culture. A New York Times report highlights the continuing struggle.
One big problem is that TSMC has been trying to do things the Taiwanese way, even in the U.S. In Taiwan, TSMC is known for extremely rigorous working conditions, including 12-hour work days that extend into the weekends and calling employees into work in the middle of the night for emergencies. TSMC managers in Taiwan are also known to use harsh treatment and threaten workers with being fired for relatively minor failures.
TSMC quickly learned that such practices won’t work in the U.S. Recent reports indicated that the company’s labor force in Arizona is leaving the new plant over these perceived abuses, and TSMC is struggling to fill those vacancies. TSMC is already heavily dependent on employees brought over from Taiwan, with almost half of its current 2,200 employees in Phoenix coming over as Taiwanese transplants.
Production is pretty easy to understaff. It’s not like an operator stands at the tool the entire time - much of the job is moving wafer cassettes from one tool to another and basically hitting “go”, then the tool runs its process in its own. Other tasks involve restocking depleted chemicals and retrieving reticles, but the main thrust of the production job type is moving things from one place to another so the tools can do their job.
Given it’s a 12.5 hour shift in a bunny suit that involves a lot of standing and walking, it’s important that employees have a certain amount of downtime during their shift, just a few minutes here and there outside of breaks and lunches where they can relax. If you run too lean, staff has to constantly scurry from tool to tool and they’ll quickly burn out. This is the TSMC way.
There’s also a lot more to a fab than its production staff. Engineers, facilities, waste water treatment, chemical handling, IT, EHS, and various administrative roles are all very easy to understaff since many positions are salaried and TSMC loves that unpaid overtime. The results roll downhill to production staff not getting the support they need, further compounding the pressure they feel.
Those are all very good points and guess what I just got called into work funnily enough!
Boooo weekend work. Sorry to hear it but good luck escaping.
There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.
If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.
For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.
It’s just greed and stupidity, plain and simple. Your points are spot on and are amongst the many reasons I suggest people in our field should avoid TSMC. I’d take a job at Intel over TSMC and that’s saying a lot