Peter S. Goodman

But meanwhile, there's a lawsuit filed by a bunch of American workers who accuse TSMC of discriminating against American workers, treating them like they're lazy and incompetent.

They accuse TSMC.

The Taiwanese managers of speaking in Chinese as a way of excluding the American workers from participating, which is probably not quite the case.

They're probably speaking Chinese because they speak Chinese.

I mean, that's the language that they could speak most efficiently.

So, I mean, this was certainly something that I heard from Taiwanese Americans who are living in Phoenix that.

You know, it's hardly an act of discrimination that, you know, someone who's under the gun to deliver on a complicated project that costs billions of dollars with the mothership breathing down their neck to deliver, they're going to want to speak to people in their native language.

TSMC is a highly successful company in its own system, but now it's navigating a different system.

And there's a different set of expectations for workers.

I mean, in Taiwan, TSMC operates in a kind of paternalistic fashion,

where we'll take care of you, you'll be very well paid, we'll get involved in your housing if need be.

But when we need you in the middle of the night, when something goes wrong at that factory, we really don't care what you're up to, you gotta be over there pronto.

And that's understood.

People work very long hours.

Construction crews work what we would call overtime without logging as such.

The American worker is operating in a system where we don't have the same sort of faith in our employers.

We don't have the same sense of social obligation.

And so the American worker comes at this from a much more contractual, hey, you know, I'm supposed to be off at five kind of standpoint.

Don't call me.

And you call me on the weekend.