Technology

They never finished the sentence in the news articles.

Business unable to find the labor it needs! Is usually where they stop they leave out the "at the price they want". From the sentence.

It really should say business unable to find the labor it needs at the price it wants

Journalists really shouldn't let businesses get away with not saying the quiet part out loud.

Very rarely is it really something like there's 13 people in the world who can do this. And none of them live here. That's an interesting story, but that's not the story that's often told. It's usually local laborers too expensive we want to import some external labor that's less expensive. At least in the United States then they craft a job specification that can't be matched locally but it's tailored specifically for an external candidate to get a visa.

I worked for a Fortune 100 tech company that claimed they couldn't get enough qualified workers to fill open jobs. It was utter bullshit. The workers they brought in from out of the country were typically right out of school or with a very short work history who needed a lot of training, not the highly skilled workers the company claimed they needed.

The foreign workers were cheap and routinely worked 100 hour weeks because they had no family or social life in the U.S. American workers with families and lives outside of work could not and would not work those kind of hours consistently. The company then would peer rank employees and (surprise!) the foreign workers working 100 hour weeks would perform more tasks than those working 60 hour weeks.

U.S. citizens would routinely be denied raises and ultimately forced out of their jobs because of this practice. What companies want and foreign workers provide is a cheap workforce that will work 100 hour weeks and can't readily switch jobs. Only a government that represents corporations instead of people would facilitate this kind of employee abuse.

I have worked in multiple wafer fabs in Arizona, there are plenty of workers but the way they do things is strictly through contractor companies where your not guaranteed a position within the actual company at all, your contract lasts for 6 months, or a year, and then hopefully when it's done the contractor you were working with has another gig for you at another Fab, or you just go with a different contractor for a different assignment. Wages are barely above minimum, there are no advancement opportunities, there's no raises, the shifts are 12 hours and most of the time the only thing that's available is overnight. The problem isn't that there aren't workers, the problem has never been that there aren't workers, the problem is that these jobs are unsustainable for workers to survive with current business practices, and rather than attempting to fix that their plan is to bring in an even more exploitable class of people.

Having worked a summer job as a clean room protocol inspector during construction of a clean room I saw that the vast majority of construction workers there didn’t give two shits about violating even the most important protocols and would I regularly be threatened with violence for enforcing them. The various contracting companies didn’t care enough to fire them.

American construction workers definitely have the skills, but they would have to work to find ones that are more disciplined than the ones I worked with.

This seems like an "if you build it, they will come" situation. We clearly don't have a thriving chip maker industry in this country, so it's going to take a while to build that job market.

I thought the US gov was dedicated to making this happen no matter the cost?

What was that Netflix documentary called... American Factory? Chinese buys glass manufacturer in US and it covers the culture differences and training when bringing Chinese labor over to train and assist American workers.

I read this Wired article a couple months ago that though long does do a really good job of covering the company, its culture, and the issues with trying to run a factory in the U.S. : https://www.wired.com/story/i-saw-the-face-of-god-in-a-tsmc-factory/