Fortune recalls that TSMC will hire about 4,500 employees for its two facilities, which will be built in Arizona in the coming years, and for many of them, the corporate culture of the Asian chipmaker may seem shockingly rigid. Weekend work and 12-hour work shifts are the norm at TSMC, and many Americans just aren’t ready to work at that pace.
Image Source: Getty Images, Bloomberg, Caitlin O’Hara
According to the source, on the Glassdoor resource, only 27% of TSMC employees surveyed are ready to recommend the company as a place of work. For comparison, in the case of Intel Corporation, this figure reaches 85%. TSMC is going to spend $40 billion to build two facilities in Arizona that will begin manufacturing products in 2024 and 2026 using 5nm and 3nm technology, respectively. TSMC will need up to 4,500 local employees to cover TSMC’s local workforce needs, more than 10% of the jobs that will be created by 2030 in the US through the implementation of the national semiconductor subsidy program, which is allocated $52 billion. Worldwide, TSMC employs 65,000 people, although the bulk of the staff is located in Taiwan and is largely subject to the corporate culture characteristic of Asian companies in the sector.
The company has already managed to hire 2,000 people, including 600 engineers, to work in American factories, and now they have to undergo months-long internships in Taiwan, which in itself scares the “recruits”. For the Taiwanese economy, TSMC is an important source of economic growth, at home the company has the ability to set high requirements for applicants. About 60% of local employees and more than 80% of managers have higher education and scientific degrees, while personnel must obey strict discipline, and attempts to discuss decisions with management are categorically suppressed. Overtime work, which is often required due to high workload, is usually not paid, and it is not customary to complain about it.
For Taiwan, TSMC offers a competitive level of wages, even at the lower level of staff it exceeds the average for the island by about one and a half times. TSMC is unlikely to be able to offer such competitive salaries to American employees, since Intel is ready to pay more. In addition, the proportion of applicants with higher education and scientific degrees is much lower in the local labor market in the United States. Sending trainees to Taiwan was also a challenge for both themselves and the company. It became difficult for new employees to arrange a business trip to the island for a year and a half, taking into account various family circumstances, and trainees who arrived in Taiwan found it difficult to get along with local mentors, because they were not used to working in a rigid hierarchy system. In the future, the company will focus on training in the United States, but some of the interns will still have to be sent to Taiwan for training.
However, in the implementation of American projects, TSMC is ready to listen to the wishes of the staff and create more familiar working conditions for them, according to sources. As company founder Morris Chang has repeatedly pointed out, manufacturing chips in the United States can cost a company at least one and a half to two times more than in Taiwan. The current management of TSMC considers it necessary to compensate for at least part of this difference through subsidies from the US authorities, but this does not solve the personnel problem as such.
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