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.
Just why would they do that? And were that their concern, wouldn’t such people work better, not worse?
I guess the rational is that a breakup would lead to worse job performance.
Well, that’s quite strange math, the amount of breakups between Walmart employees is expected to be less that the amount of relationships. Facts from the former are mostly a subset of facts from the latter actually.
Unless we consider the possibility that couples come to work at Walmart and break up there, but couples rarely form while already there.
Justification I’ve heard is that if one part of the couple is managing the other, or is promoted after the relationship started, then:
Companies will want to both avoid this sort of things, and avoid being seen to enable this sort of things. They might want to move one of the parties to a different department so that the higher up one doesn’t make promotion decisions for the other.
I’ve once worked at a company that wanted to know about relationships between their employees and suppliers/customers’ employees, again because that might enable situations where a supplier / customer is treater favourably because of personal relationships