American employees flee TSMC due to 12-hour shifts and moral pressure

It is generally accepted that labor shortages were one of the reasons for the delay in construction of TSMC’s Arizona plants, but knowledgeable sources explain that new employees of the company’s American plant also have to deal with unusual treatment that is simply not accepted in the US labor market.

As Tom’s Hardware explains, 12-hour shifts and weekend work are the norm at the company’s Taiwanese operations, and managers often threaten employees with dismissal for minor infractions. American engineering personnel, faced with such practices, are not ready to tolerate such treatment, and therefore some employees of the new TSMC plant in Arizona have already begun to quit.

Many of the future employees of the American company TSMC were sent to Taiwan for an internship back in 2021, and there they encountered the specifics of the local corporate culture. High psychological pressure on staff and 12-hour shifts came as a shock to many interns, and one American engineer was surprised that his boss during the internship could not identify specific priorities in work, calling all current tasks of paramount importance.

Working overtime is the norm at TSMC. Its founder, Morris Chang, also gave an example with the timing of troubleshooting equipment: if it breaks down at one in the morning, then in the USA it will be repaired only the next morning, and in Taiwan everything will be ready by two in the morning. Employees constantly have to sacrifice personal time for the sake of the company’s interests. Some of the trainees ended up leaving TSMC while still in Taiwan, others returned to the US and tried to continue working for the company, but not feeling a change for the better, they also quit. Some of them were assigned work unusual for their position – for example, cleaning up construction waste. Attempts to teach Taiwanese leaders not to raise their voices at subordinates in public have led to nothing good. Excessive management requirements led to the fact that the test results when checking product quality were simply falsified by the performers.

Since some of the TSMC employees involved in the construction of American plants were sent from Taiwan to Arizona, they had difficulty finding a common language with their American colleagues, given the difference in corporate cultures and traditions. The psychological climate within the team left much to be desired, and this had a negative impact on work efficiency.