> [...] we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people.
TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. It's literally an Asian company moving production to the US.
Taiwan isn't some rando poor Asian country; it's a rich democracy. The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive.
> TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company.
This isn't about a particular company, it's an industry-wide trend. Semiconductor manufacturing was predominantly in the US, then it wasn't.
> The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive.
This is actually the root of the problem. The problem isn't the existence of labor or environmental laws, it's that many labor and environmental laws exist in the US that can't survive a cost benefit analysis, so the US loses manufacturing to countries with a more efficient regulatory environment.
People act like regulation is some binary thing where the only choices are "on" or "off" when the reality is that the details are what matter.
The article is about a specific company. People are commenting with generalizations that don't apply to TSMC and so it is rather unclear how these comments are on topic. The comments also don't acknowledge that they don't apply to the specific context of the article which makes them misleading and in need of correction.
It is not necessary for the labor and environmental laws to be such that they "can't survive a cost benefit analysis" for them to create a force pushing manufacturing towards places without those laws. Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree.
> Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree.
There's more to it than that.
The ban on leaded gasoline makes gasoline somewhat more expensive. If you multiply that by all the unleaded gasoline everybody has bought since the 1970s, that's a lot of money! But lead is really, really, really bad. That ban is cost effective even if it costs billions of dollars. Which it does, but the alternative is much worse.
There are other regulations that cost just as much and provide nowhere near the same benefit. The deterrent effect on doing business in the US of both regulations is the same, but the benefit we receive isn't.
And the deterrent is cumulative. There are advantages to doing business in the US. An educated workforce and a stable government etc. Companies move out when the cumulative regulatory deterrent exceeds the advantages.
Which means you can have a ban on leaded gasoline without anyone leaving, because the cost of that doesn't exceed the other advantages of the US. Which means that anyone trying to repeal the ban on leaded gasoline is doing it wrong.
But if you have a ban on leaded gasoline and 250,000 other regulations that each cost just as much but are barely breakeven if that on the benefit side, you exceed the threshold and lose the jobs. To get the jobs back, you have to get rid of some of the regulations.
We need to get rid of the ones with a poor cost benefit ratio, not the ones with a great cost benefit ratio. Which is, to be honest, most of them -- but it's still really important that it be the right ones.
Every regulation (that isn't globally applied/enforced (so all of them)) creates a regulatory deterrent (where it is applied/enforced), independently of its benefit. This is what I said, and this is also implicit in your comment.
The advantages of doing business in the US that are balanced against "cumulative regulatory deterrent" are largely independent of the specific regulations involved, though not always (much harder to get an educated workforce when everyone is lead-poisoned in childhood). Deciding which costs should be considered baked in (you're saying "no leaded gasoline") and which are on the margin (you're saying whichever 250,000 you claim are as costly as no leaded gasoline) is not inherent to the problem based on "efficiency" alone.
"Benefit" is rarely neutral. Values and politics are its domain. ("It's your luggage that has put the plane over its weight threshold, not my luggage!")
Also,
> To get the jobs back, you have to get rid of some of the regulations.
presumes that other countries' regulatory environments are functionally fixed and not impacted by international cooperation. International effort imposed extra costs on those who would employ child labor, for instance. Other types of responses exist besides "well we have to let them give Kentuckian factory-workers spinal problems because otherwise they'll go off and give Vietnamese factory-workers spinal problems!"
I didn't read that comment in relation to TSMC, but as a rebuttal to the GP's assertion that it was "people" who drove US production over seas over the past 40 years.
I can only think of lame examples I'm sorry but there is this silly trend where careful expert design is replaced with letting the end user decide. To me this is just a sign of incompetence. The expert needs to carefully craft into the product what the user wants but only after careful examination. The lame examples would be to let the driver design the car, the passenger the aircraft or the patient the surgery room etc
The story as told above on how production moved to cheap labor countries, jobs were lost as well as purchase power has a weird continuation where the decline of purchase power scales down production and makes life harder for the cheap laborer therefore more fragile. We shift from [the absurd] putting the consumer in charge of the economic decisions to having the "choices" made by (or more like making the results depend on-) people all the way at the bottom of the food chain. We are pretty much left collectively hoping that they can keep up with our unreasonably demanding demands.
I'm not even complaining that we are squeezing people to hard. I have issues with a system that can just abruptly stop - entirely! Sure, I want cheaper products but I have no idea what kind of risks we are taking. I should not be the one to decide. I would rather have a large group of highly trained professionals calculate the risks and present them in a way we might understand. Make me a map of the [proverbial] meteor strikes and the global economic consequences. What parts of the show can go on if ingredient X is taken out of the soup?
(edit: Ofc there is more than cheap labor pushing localized specializations which increase efficiency and decrease resilience)
In this specific situation that's glossing things over as well. I would have chosen locally made except intel completely stalled their progress for years. In my recent upgrade I went with a TSMC (I believe) made AMD chip because it had better access to SSDs and PCI bus and cores that I couldn't get in an intel chip AND better prices. It's hard to buy local if local companies in fast evolving products are going to sit on their laurels.
Painting it as a single company moving back and forth is an oversimplification but in a open market it's pretty close to "company located in US loses business to company located in less expensive country." Taiwan is hardly cheap but local labor-dependent stuff in Taipei seemed cheaper than the US when I visited - unlike Europe, say. Similarly, fewer workers seem to leave the US for better-paying jobs in Taiwan then vice versa. Googling salary estimates for EE jobs in Taiwan gives me ranges of up to 2.5M NT annual (90K USD) or 80K NT per month ($2900 USD).
TSMC was also founded in 1987, Taiwan has changed a lot over the decades and at a certain point inertia works for a lot even as costs may even out compared to in the past. What were those salaries in 2000?
TSMC's largest customers are American though. Apple, Nvidia, and AMD. These companies sourced their chips internationally to TSMC for cost reasons, related mainly to labor. They're to blame. There's a compounding effect too. They could've purchased American chips and subsidized American foundries. They didn't and instead American foundries have fallen behind.
The GDP per capita of Taiwan is higher than France. It's not the place you move jobs to to optimize for labor costs.
Again, there's a pretty racist subtext here that because it's in Asia, you assume that must be cheap labor, not innovation. Would you have the same argument if the fabs were in France or Spain, both of which have lower GDPs per capita than Taiwan?
Calling this racist seems applicable but quite a stretch to me.
From the article is seems workers in Taiwan work 12 hour days as normal. Couple that with the fact that manufacturing used by primarily US being done outside US borders is generally some for cost saving reasons and it seems to make sense to assume that Taiwan IS doing this cheaper somehow. If it were a matter of innovation wouldn't the same innovation hold in their new plant in Arizona?
The article is about engineers, not factory workers. Are you really telling me there's no culture of overworking for engineers in Silicon Valley? It's contrasting Arizona with Taiwan; I don't think this same article would be written about Silicon Valley vs. Taiwan.
There's also a difference between what you're saying and what the great-grandparent said: being cheaper can be because they have better processes or are more innovative, or have shorter supply lines, or better access to mainland China or whatever.
But the great-grandparent both (a) assumed that tech fundamentally belongs to the US, and if it's being done somewhere else, it's in service to the US, and (b) that the primary reason someone would produce things outside of the US is labor costs.
Labor costs are no longer the primary reason things are produced outside of the US. At this point, it's primarily industrial capacity and know-how.
Salary info I'm finding on google suggest that electrical engineers still get paid less in Taiwan than in the US. I'd also be very curious what those numbers looked like over the decades when offshoring really ramped up.
Not "10x less" or anything incredibly dramatic, but for a business, money saved is money saved.
It's silly to have a whole thread of back and forth responses on "is it racist to say cost of labor is cheaper somewhere else" without looking at the numbers to see if it actually is. GDP per capita is very much not the same as salary.
Personally I'm waiting for engineering salaries in the non-US to catch up to the US because it'll make it easier for me to leave the US if I choose to do so but it doesn't look like it's happened yet.
Engineers in virtually every country in the world make less money than in the US. But the reason people have jobs in the rest of the world isn't because everyone wants to make things in the US, but it's just too expensive, so they'll settle for somewhere else. That's pretty heavy-handed American exceptionalism.
TSCM has the best fabs in the world. This article literally mentions them having to build the factory in the US and send people over to teach the Americans how to run it. They're just better at it. To keep insisting that that's not the case, and that this is really all about their lower salaries is, in fact, racist.
Here we're looking at an industry where the US used to be dominant. So it's not a question of "how did another country beat the US to this sort of industry despite having less money floating around than the US?" It's specifically "how did this industry leave the US and why is it non-trivial to rebuild some of it?"
I'm talking about the how of them becoming the best in the world, not arguing that they aren't the best now. As money for semiconductor manufacturing moved to overseas companies, initially driven by costs, those companies ended up with the money to invest in getting good at it.
But that money was directed there as a result of specific actions by people in the US. So yes, all the conversation about immediate-cost-focused decisions, and the difference in the labor costs, are relevant.
It's not "American exceptionalism" to be aware of this history, it's "American exceptionalism" that caused this and that drives the laissez faire attitude that there wouldn't be domestic impact like loss of expertise and reliance on overseas producer from a focus on immediate cost over all else. The idea that if we wanted to, we could simply build the industry back up. Because we're America! Same as all the rest of "it can't happen here" BS that people use to excuse ignoring various domestic issues.
--
To frame the labor cost issue a different way, let's look at what the reverse process, bringing that expertise back to the US, would look like: let's say tomorrow the US wanted to build up a domestic best-in-the-world alternative company. They'd have to hire a bunch of engineers! Even best-case, it would take those engineers quite a while to reproduce all the earned knowledge and expertise of TSMC's engineers. All the while you're gonna have to pay those engineers more than TSMC's engineers are making, because it's a more expensive labor market. And then even if they do produce equally high levels of output after a while, all those higher costs are going to put them at a competitive disadvantage. So if you want to be good at it domestically, and you live in a country with more competition for labor, you really have to commit to spending extra to do it. (Getting TSMC to build some plants domestically is a way of short-cutting the knowledge acquisition step, but it's just a small step towards really rebuilding the industry.)
Except that your history is wrong in this case. It's more about politics and Intel's failure, and Taiwan and TSMC's capitalization on that than it is about salaries.
A lot of manufacturing did move to Taiwan in the 70s and 80s because labor costs were lower there then, and because the US was investing a lot in Taiwan because of its strategic role vis-a-vis mainland China. But that wasn't especially high tech, and was decades before TSMC became relevant on the global market for anything but very low-end chips.
The way that TSMC ended up on top was by beating Intel at its own game. It did that at a time where Taiwan was already rich, and the US wasn't actively subsidizing the semi-conductor industry, whereas Taiwan's government was. It seems naive to assume that Intel wouldn't have had a decade of missed deadlines if it'd just thrown more money at the problem. In that this article started off about corporate culture, it's not hard to argue that much of what killed US chip fabrication dominance was Intel's corporate culture (as opposed to cheap Asian labor).
Basically there was a lot of consolidation in fabrication in the US, then with all of the eggs in a couple of baskets, the US-based fabs dropped the ball, and TSMC and Samsung smelled blood and stepped up their game.
Ah, I see we're talking across each other some actually because of talking about different timeframes. I was confused by comments about Taiwan being rich when I was thinking about a story starting in the late 80s, not just the last decade.
I'm not particularly focused on Intel at the very top-end here. TSMC capitalizing on Intel dropping the ball in the 2010s doesn't happen if there wasn't a trend that continued through the 90s and 2000s that helps them get in the position to capitalize. Labor costs then were part of the equation - after all, they still haven't fully caught up.
The US being down to essentially one player that made their living focusing on just the top of the market is because of that process that hollowed out the US-based industry.
The alternative scenario I'm pitching isn't "Intel doesn't screw up cause they throw even more money at it" it's "the US semiconductor industry has multiple big players so that the are more domestic players to try to pounce on Intel's mistakes." But, because of cost pressure, including cost of labor, I believe that would take specific action and policy choices.
(This also isn't just a "US vs Asia" thing - Japanese companies have lost business to other more recent Asian entrants in the electronics and related manufacturing space as well.)
> Personally I'm waiting for engineering salaries in the non-US to catch up to the US because it'll make it easier for me to leave the US if I choose to do so but it doesn't look like it's happened yet.
Let me chime in to say that salary isn't everything in life, or the key to live a good, fulfilling life. I'd even argue that socialized healthcare and worker's rights, ensured in numerous European countries, do far more to achieve good life than, say, an absurdly high salary.
I would imagine there comes a point where an "absurdly" high salary can more than compensate for deficiencies in the US healthcare system. Sacrificing some work-life balance as well.
In the latter case, that point is different for different people, but if you're making FAANG seniorSWE+ level compensation (especially if it's at one of the easier FAANGs), I would think the options to optimize your quality of life is probably higher in the US than in the hypothetical more socialistic European countries you mention.
> Personally I'm waiting for engineering salaries in the non-US to catch up to the US because it'll make it easier for me to leave the US if I choose to do so but it doesn't look like it's happened yet.
What difference would it make to your quality of life if you made $60k in Europe instead of $150k in America? Sure, your net worth wouldn't increase at the same rate, but should we define our lives around our net worth?
It would primary affect both the specific city/location and quality of housing my family was in as well as our long-term economic security and flexibility. The latter is the most important part, but the former is important to me as well.
Having money in the bank is basically the same as having choices.
This implies that someone making $60k in Europe is living in poorer quality housing and/or living in a poorer location compared to someone making $150k in America, which I do believe to be the case.
>as well as our long-term economic security and flexibility >Having money in the bank is basically the same as having choices.
Do people in Europe not have long-term economic security and flexibility? Do they not have choices?
> Americans workers at TSMC’s Arizona fab may chafe at becoming the humble students of their mentors in Taiwan, who nearly 50 years ago transferred semiconductor technology from RCA of the U.S.
It was more geostrategic rather than capitalist outsourcing that lead to the knowledge transfer, but after that transfer was complete, the economic factors mentioned by the person you're responding to would fully be in effect. A nontrivial part of Taiwan's economic success has been that knowledge transfer that enabled the creation of TSMC.
Going by the article, it seems a large part of the "culture clash" is TSMC's insistence on three hours of meetings each day and using outdated software that was designed back in 1987(!). While workers in Taiwan used to work 12 hour days, time worked is not a good indicator of productivity and I'm willing to bet that TSMC's massive profitability meant there wasn't much incentive to make the work process more efficient.
Honestly, I'm surprised so much hands-on work is needed when we're talking about a semiconductor company. One would think a lot of the fine-tuning work, which seems to be what requires a lot of the labor, could be easily automated with current technology.
Any company that runs down worker resources by running them out of spec is not sustainable and indicative of a lack of mature management. You wouldn't run your physical machinery outside of its operating area, so don't do it to your workforce. Automate. Fabs are the knife edge of technology, literally building the components that go into all other forms of automation, yet they are reliant on primate and medieval era organizational structures and processes?
Ask anyone who worked in retail for a long time. When they replaced the point of sale and catalog search systems in the early 2000's, everyone's productivity plummeted.
They replaced old, DOS/Norton-style keyboard-only systems with a legion of shortcuts and archaic codes with Web-based touch-screen or mouse-based UIs with modern UX etc.
The new technology was obviously more modern and allowed faster training, and it's hard to imagine any world where that upgrade doesn't happen. But the old system was faster, and allowed experienced users to do more.
Now, if you're talking about a Blockbuster Video, maybe it's the right choice.
But if you're talking about extremely specialized semiconductor manufacturing, maybe you stick with the highly optimized system that works. Some things changed a lot since 1987. Others haven't.
I appreciate the sentiment, but we are talking about different things. My comment was directed entirely at how hard some companies push their workforce, not what era the technology is from.
My impression was that the extra hours are due to the factories being on a 24/7 uninterrupted production cycle. Having people work 12 hour shifts instead of 8 reduces the headcount required by 33%.
I don't think shift duration changes the headcount, it really depends on the total hours per week each person is working.
There's 168 hours in a week. If people work for 40 hours a week, to cover the 168 hours you need to employ 4.2 people for every employee you want on the floor at any given time. That means everyone works 5 8-hour shifts, or 3.3 12-hour shifts per week.
If you reduce headcount by 33%, that works out to 2.8 people per employee on the floor, which means everyone works 60 hours per week -- 7.5 8-hour shifts, or 5 12-hour shifts. That's a lot.
Not true, you can pay 33% or more and still save money on overhead, head count, and shift changes. You see this in the US despite overtime laws, where it is still better to pay a worker 150% for the extra hours.
> While workers in Taiwan used to work 12 hour days, time worked is not a good indicator of productivity and I'm willing to bet that TSMC's massive profitability meant there wasn't much incentive to make the work process more efficient.
That's one of the pitfall of low labor costs: since time is virtually free it tends to create a culture that doesn't use it efficiently.
I've seen it with offshored devs way too often; why take the time to learn version control when you can pass around code in emails and on thumb drives?
You should watch "American Factory" on Netflix. It is about a Chinese company opening a factory in Ohio. There may be economics behind the different work cultures, but the cultures are hugely different at this point. The Chinese managers are actually baffled that workers only want to work for the paycheck, and don't work hard for pride. They have to take courses about how American workers need to be coddled and treated as special.
Not a factory, and Korean instead of Chinese, but I worked for one of the major householdname Korean conglomerates at their US branch. It was well known amongst the Korean and Korean-American employees that their salaries were lowballed versus their non-Korean colleagues, and that they were also expected to work longer hours.
The reason?
"Korean Pride".
You were expected to go above and beyond for sake of the glory and well being of the Republic of Korea and the Korean People, via the proxy of The Company.
Most of us (myself included) internally thought this was total bullshit, and were on the lookout for the first opportunity to jump ship specifically for a non-Korean company. Of course we would never admit that to a manager, especially the expats from Korea.
It was also known that the best teams to work for in terms of work-life balance and just general pleasantness were ones where the manager and teammates were comprised mostly (or entirely) of non-Koreans, or at least heavily Americanized Korean-Americans. Having an older conservative expat Korean manager was the worst possible scenario.
One nice perk was having a big name like The Company on your resume wasn't bad at all for future job prospects.
People can't consume more than they produce, unless they are riding on the coat tails other workers. Right now, America is used to riding on the coat tails of Asian labour and that is eventually going to come to an end.
One factor you are missing in that analysis: TSMC is very profitable—about $5 billion per quarter. Better working conditions don't have to mean more expensive products; it could instead mean reduced profits.
Where do those profits go? Presumably TSMC doesn't just sit on it. Surely they either invest it back into their business to stay competitive or deal it out as compensation.
To put that into scale, here's some quotes from TSMC's Wikipedia article[0]:
> In November 2020 officials in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States approved TSMC's plan to build a $12 billion chip plant in the city. [...] In 2021, news reports claimed that the facility may be tripled to roughly a $35 billion investment with six factories.
> In November 2021, TSMC and Sony announced that TSMC would be establishing a new subsidiary named Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing (JASM) in Kumamoto, Japan. [...]. The initial investment will be approximately $7 billion with Sony investing approximately $500 million for a less than 20% stake.
When you're committing to $42B of investments, $28.4B doesn't seem like all that much to have on hand.
Investments and bonuses are not part of any of those categories. Profits don't just get dumped into a Scrooge McDuck-esque money pool. Businesses obviously keep some money on hand, but it doesn't benefit anyone involved to have the money sit there forever. Profits are eventually used to fund expansions, acquisitions, improvements, charitable donations, rewards, etc.
I don’t think the parent response is correct, though, if by profit (colloquially) we go by earnings that could be distributed to shareholders.
Sure, gross profit would not include either of those expenses. But operating profit would subtract research and development (e.g. the salaries and bonuses of the engineers working on the next process node) and depreciation on new factory (i.e. the cost of the new factory spread out over its useful lifetime - though it doesn’t include a factory under construction). Then you subtract interest and taxes to get to net profit. And TSMC has net profit margins of 39% in 2020!
There's nothing cynical about that, for most companies in the world their entire purpose and primary reason for existence - explicitly and openly stated, and mandated by their bylaws - is to generate this return on investment for the owners.
Like, this is the primary goal; any other uses of profit are valid only with the expectation that they will allow the owners to extract more money later.
I don't think that dividends are typically coupled to inflation. The return on an investment (at least via stock ownership) includes dividends + asset appreciation, right? I would expect the combination to be related to inflation but not necessarily dividends alone. Is that the right way to think about it? I'm not a finance guy.
An idealized company in a static market that has been making the same real (i.e. inflation adjusted) profits for a while and is expected to for quite some time will have its price track inflation, so any dividends paid out will be on top of inflation.
Real life is much messier than the above, due to things like speculation (how much some people think other people will think the company will be worth in a year), changes in the broader market (if the "zero risk" rate of returns goes up or down, then equities, which have higher risk will tend to move in the opposite direction), and such can have drastic effects on a company's market value.
How so? The rich don't benefit from profits being tied up in a business account. If they want that money, they either have to receive it as immediate compensation or invest it in hopes of receiving even greater compensation in the future.
The generally accepted meaning of "compensation" is not related to distribution of profit. All compensation to employees and managers (including bonuses) is a "before-profit" expense; and all distribution of profits to company owners like dividends and stock buybacks is not called compensation, that's an entirely separate category.
"we want reasonable jobs that allow us to have a life and do not functionally make us the property of a corporate entity that does not share sufficient amounts of the gains of our labor with us and labels requests to be treated with respect as unintelligible"
States/those with power claiming things are 'unintelligible' when in fact they just don't like them or want to treat them as valid is a classic form of control.
The power they have over the "corporate" entity is a function of what they have to offer relative to everyone else. A few decades ago when US corps made everything and the rest of the world bought them they could demand high paying union jobs and get them. The cost of this was subsidized by buyers from around the world and cheap input material and energy corps could get due to US's geopolitical position.
That ship has sailed.
Now they have to be more in line with the rest of the world.
What the "corporation" can offer and survive or stay ahead of the pack is a function of choices available to it. Which are different now than decades ago.
This myth that Americans can demand better things that the rest of the world can't needs to die. If they want to work less, great! They can. They need to become more efficient and produce more goods with less labor. Otherwise people in other countries will not want to trade with them. That is reflected to the American worker through the set of jobs and work conditions available to them.
Workers have to compete with everyone else in the world. If a company employs American workers who demand high wages to do the same work that international workers do for less pay that company will fail. The economy is a competition, companies can't just give away money.
> The economy is a competition, companies can't just give away money.
And this article makes that point very salient, as does antiunion drives at many companies. Say it costs me X to run a PR campaign about lazy workers or hire an antiunion consulting firm. It might cost me Y to raise pay, hire more workers, and/or improve working conditions. If X is less than Y and achieves the same effect - I do X, if Y is less, I do Y.
Employees are allowed to make employers compete as well. This is HN, like the home of the switch companies regularly in silicon valley & silicon valley was created because no non-competes.
In a flush labor market, employees compete for jobs from companies. In a tight labor market companies might have to compete (and treating workers better/paying more is a form of competing). If you don't want to compete by paying more, you can compete by accepting lower quality - just like if I go buy a product from a company or its competitors.
The strident defenses of the poor companies having to compete for labor being unfair is just such a strange narrative to me but one that has weaseled its way into a lot of the American subconscious.
If TSMC did know enough about American semiconductor employee work culture before investing $12 Billion in a new factory that they are surprised by this that's on them. If we accept your claim about American workers demanding higher wages than international workers for the same effort, then TSMC certainly knew that going in. TMSC isn't some innocent and naïve child...but they did build near Intel's castle hoping (it seems) to extract intellectual capital. A lot of those ex Intel-ers leave because of burnout and may have a shorter tolerance for BS than TSMC. TSMC is one of the top 10 employers in Taiwan, maybe that was something they didn't consider the influence of that in their work culture enough?
My suspicion is that this is an effectively planted article as part of a drive for better incentives by TSMC. This stinks of Foxconn and Wisconsin.
The engineers at this TSMC plant will get what they want. TSMC knows that which is why they wrote this article. The people who are really fucked are the blue collar workers whose job is moving to a sweatshop in south east asia.
except if it were solely up to TSMC this fab would not even exist. this whole project is a product of US pressure on Taiwan, as they would have much more leverage over the US if they kept their semiconductor expertise to themselves. let's not pretend the US would be so gung-ho if it weren't for TSMC, Taiwan provides little value otherwise
No you can reasonably have high wages, decent profits, and high output. Big tech in the US already does that exceptionally well. There's no reason TSMC can't do it, other than they don't want to sacrifice some profit.
TSMC is upset because of the lack of enough slave labor in Arizona.
"People" in each line are different groups of people. ...but the underlying lesson is correct - you cannot just listen to the loudest group. You have to enact policies that are based on an educated understanding of economics.
I suppose even if there were different groups (say, one free trade group, another protectionist group), the people individually could have coherent opinions. It would then go wrong when the elected representatives try to pander to both groups simultaneously.
Electronics/anything that uses ICs should never have been as cheap as they are now. NAFTA has been a fucking disaster; we're addicted to cheap shit we don't need, and it's near-impossible to break. It affects every aspect of society.
There might be a bit of that. 12 hour days are not unheard of in other parts of the country. Doctors in the ER can work even longer shifts (though obviously the stakes are incommensurate; still, I would contest the soundness of having tired doctors performing medical procedures).
But there's also the question of whether it is truly necessary. Will hiring more workers to cover more shifts really increase production costs that much?
If you're competing with cheap labor, possibly slave labor, then you have to look to other ways to push back, like fast tracking immigration of talent from places like Taiwan, imposing tariffs on imports from countries with cheap labor, investing in automation to reduce production time and costs, etc.
Sometimes there isn't much you can do, but generally speaking, while private business is a good thing, it is also true that private business cannot contradict the common good. The idea that you can simply do whatever you want because you're private is simply nonsense.
People: We want stuff cheaply, immediately and in immense volume!
Production: Moves to Asia
People: We want jobs!
Production: Opens a new factory in the USA
People: We don’t want to work that much!
Production: increases pay, which increases product cost
People: this is too expensive. Can we buy from overseas cheaply instead?
Production: Closes USA factory, moves back to Asia.
People: we want jobs…