Happy Labor Day to those who celebrate by working!
Back in 2020, I covered Netflix: American Factory, a documentary of what happens when Chinese glass-making experts try to train Americans to be useful and also what happens to foreign investors when Democrat politicians circle the investment. In case you missed it, the New York Times ran an interesting follow-up to this movie: “What Works in Taiwan Doesn’t Always in Arizona, a Chipmaking Giant Learns” (August 8, 2024).
TSMC modeled its facility in Phoenix on one at home. But bringing the company’s complex manufacturing process to America has been a bigger challenge than it expected.
“We keep reminding ourselves that just because we are doing quite well in Taiwan doesn’t mean that we can actually bring the Taiwan practice here,” said Richard Liu, the director of employee communications and relations at the site.
In recent interviews, 12 TSMC employees, including executives, said culture clashes between Taiwanese managers and American workers had led to frustration on both sides. TSMC is known for its rigorous working conditions. It’s not uncommon for people to be called into work for emergencies in the middle of the night. In Phoenix, some American employees quit after disagreements over expectations boiled over, according to the employees, some of whom asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
While it was under construction, the company sent American engineers to Tainan for training and to shadow their Taiwanese counterparts, observing TSMC’s all-hands-on-deck way of working up close.
Jefferson Patz, an engineer fresh off a master’s degree from the University of California, San Diego, went to Tainan in 2021 for 18 months of training shortly after he joined the company.
“Oh, my gosh, people work hard,” Mr. Patz said. He recalled that this initial impression had given him a strong sense of what it took to succeed in the industry.
After returning to Arizona, Mr. Patz said, employees were expected to pitch in with work outside their job descriptions because construction of the facility was behind schedule.
This approach did not sit well with everyone. Workers were required to do whatever was needed to finish the most pressing job, he said. Some of the American workers also found it difficult to spend a long stretch of time in Taiwan.
TSMC should be able to make this work simply by paying $2 million/year to each worker in order to get smart conscientious people from among the U.S. population of 335 million (or maybe 350 million if we count the undocumented more accurately), but that could be a painful hit to profits! Let’s check out the labor pool in Taiwan vs. Arizona. World Population Review:
The same source gives an average IQ for Arizona of 98, substantially lower than Taiwan’s average of 106 (I question the use of 5 digits of precision, but maybe someone with a higher IQ than mine prepared the above table). American average IQ is falling, so the spread between AZ and Taiwan will only get worse.
How about conscientiousness, the willingness to show up to work every day and try to do every step of a procedure correctly? That’s heritable and the Americans with the highest fertility are those who barely work (source; the high fertility of those earning $300,000+/year can be ignored on a population-wide basis because there aren’t a lot of those parents).
Maybe it won’t matter for profits how ill-suited the average American worker is to working in a state-of-the-art fab because TSMC will be so stuffed with U.S. tax dollars that they can pay to get the workers they need.
They work harder but how many holidays do they get & what is their retirement age? We’re constantly getting shut down by Chinese holidays. Every other week seems to be chinese new year, golden week, labor week, Greenspun week. The typical manufacturing contract for the last 20 years involved paying them in stonk rather than cash like the salaried chumps. The stonk seemed to retain more value than cash.
I had always assumed a well-run chip fab would just be a bunch of people in bunny suits sticking wafers in whatever machine they went in next and pressing “play” like making microwave popcorn, but without the risk of burning.
How are they having so many “emergencies”?
SAT scores are also down 31 points in the last two years. At this point it can’t be because of school lockdowns four years ago. Why is American IQ decreasing?
1. Covid brain-fog (Republicans think it is no big deal)
2. Decreasing education attainment (Republicans hate college (woke! WOKE!))
3. Worse public school education (Republicans like unaccountable private schools and sucking the public system dry through vouchers, charter schools)
4. General disdain for facts (the Republican leader is, factually, the most documented liar in the history of the human species)
5. Anti-vax attitudes (why should you not get a disease when you can get it!)
6. Mind control chemicals in chemtrails (standard right-wing conspiracy)
7. Cultism (Donald J[esus] Trump)
8. General anger, then anger and confusion when what you are told to be angry about doesn’t match reality (see the entire right-wing media echo chamber) (here in the upper Midwest all (R) political commercials are about illegals! ILLEGALS!!! — I haven’t seen one illegal begging on a street corner, haven’t seen one illegal in my neighborhood, I haven’t seen one illegal anywhere, even the Home Depot parking lot when I was there an hour ago. Haven’t had one friend/relative/colleague complain about losing a job to an illegal, but boy am I sure scared about ILLEGALS!)
Mike: if you say that you know that there are no “illegals” in your midst, does that mean you’ve been demanding documents from everyone you encounter?
Dear Mike,
I am so sorry to hear that your SAT scores and IQ are down so much in the past three years and I am pretty sure my Joe would agree (Joe is napping right now or I would inquire how his are doing). Our family, just like yours, has been terribly impacted by COVID brain fog so I’ve been prescribing my Joe some Namenda, which unfortunately hasn’t done a darn thing for him…but you should definitely give it a shot! Let me know if you need an Rx. Also, get another COVID booster and wear a cloth mask (Anthony Fauci says the both work wonders!) I know a lot about Facts (read the first paragraph of my wonderful PhD dissertation-it’s got some complex mathematics that will stun you I’m sure. I get angry too pretty often, and honestly so does my Joe, but then he always bucks me up by saying “C’mon man!” and I instantly feel better (Joe not so much). In terms of your illegals problem (I love your capitalization for emphasis!) we don’t have any around the White House (go figure). And, neither does Barack and Michelle around their $10 million dollar seaside mansion on Martha’s Vineyard (they were super smart to quickly ship away the few that dared to show up on the Vineyard in recent years). Those pesky illegals!
Best regards,
Dr. Jill Biden (and a still sleeping Joey).
Have the speeches and interviews of nominal President, Joseph R. Biden (yes, he STILL is officially the President, due to the VP’s failure to do her 25th Amendment duty) served to elevate the Americans intellect?
Will his replacement, who was unable to adapt to French-language education at age 12, is reported to have graduated from Howard University with a 2.95 GPA, and essentially refuses to speak to the (supportive, partisan) press encourage Americans to place greater emphasis on intelligence and academic rigor?
2.95 GPA at Harvard, where most popular grade is A, is equivalent of failing out of our neighborhood community college.
@perplexed
Kamala did not attend HARVard, the R1 Ivy League member in Cambridge Mass. where Philip’s parents met, but HOWard, the “historically (and currently 69%) Black” R2 MEAC member in DC.
If you saw Eddie Murphy in 1988’s “Coming to America,” think “It’s not McDonald’s, it’s McDowell’s!”
Howard might have more rigorous grading standards than Harvard!
I need new glasses.
9. America is getting invaded by uneducated peasants from countries not known for high IQ. These peasants breed like flies. In the US, educated people have one or 2 kids. Peasants have far more.
Of course IQ is dropping. How could it not?
Dr. Jill Biden, seems like Mike has experienced this IQ decline himself? What say you?
I thought IQ is racist.
How smart is it to work in a hellish, Dickensian, unhealthy environment? And if the management is smart, why don’t they realize that people with advanced degrees won’t put up with abuse, or do what sounds like potentially dangerous duties far outside their professional training and job description for which they may be physically unprepared, e.g., construction?
It’s one thing to pitch in due to an emergency (e.g, Cummins engineers evacuating records, media, and computers to their homes for safekeeping or installing sandbags ahead of a generational flood in 2008), but this sounds like a long-term issue resulting from poor management planning rather than an Act of God, plus doing heavy construction work without training is much riskier than filling a few sandbags and taking a LaserJet and a SPARCStation home.
J question IQ statistic as a measure of general intelligence, if high IQ individuals tend to work on others longer for less money and submit to erratic management.
However, high IQ individuals, like our rennesance man host Philip, do not display such behaviour.
So I question how IQ being collected and reported.
“American Factory” was painful to watch. The American workers were not impressive and had very bad attitudes. I worked in factories in Japan in the early 1990s and it was an order of magnitude cleaner and workers weren’t such malcontents. What an embarassment this movie was.