Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company reportedly has 1000 Taiwanese employees at it’s Fab 21 site in Arizona. That would mean that something like half of all employees at an American fab are in fact Taiwanese.
After TSMC began building Fab 21 near Phoenix, Arizona, the company said it needed to dispatch more than 1,000 skilled workers from Taiwan so it could complete the project on time and within budget. This made Arizona unions furious, as they argued it essentially took positions from locals, and the situation even spurred a separate lawsuit for racial discrimination. Today, about 50% of the staff at the fab still originate from Taiwan, but this will change over time as TSMC builds out additional phases of its factory, reports the New York Times.
About half of the 2,200 employees at TSMC’s Fab 21 in Arizona come from Taiwan. When announcing the project in 2020, TSMC assured the public it would create jobs for locals, so bringing over 1,000 employees from Taiwan contradicts the foundry’s promise to hire talent from Arizona, which naturally angered unions.
Okay then… that is not good news for the American semiconductor ecosystem. If TSMC needs 1000 employees from Taiwan to get a fab up and running smoothly then what does that say about American technological prowess and knowledge?
It says we aren’t ready to bring all the high tech manufacturing we NEED to bring back to the United States. It says we don’t have the skillset anymore to manufacture semiconductors at scale beyond what we already do. At least we don’t have the skilled individuals in the quantity necessary to bring back semiconductor manufacturing. We certainly do have some individuals out there who can do this stuff… but you know… they’re mostly already employed.
So what does that mean?
It means the United States has to work hard on bringing up new, highly skilled, individuals who are capable of doing the diverse jobs that will be available as high tech manufacturing comes back to the United States.
It means CHIPS Act investments should have considered manpower restrictions / bottlenecks in the United States economy.
It means that future investments need to consider manpower seriously and work hard to raise up skilled labor BEFORE it is needed at the completed fabs. A $30 million investment in training here, a $10 million investment in education there, is not enough. We’re talking about a systemic shift in the economy to domestic high tech manufacturing. That will take a lot of people and require a lot of time and money.
Compared to Taiwan, the US semiconductor ecosystem is fragile and needs to be babied. This babying should include the systemic training of labor for a high tech manufacturing future and not just investments in the factories themselves.