Hacker News Reader

Comment by Edman274 | Hacker News Reader

1. A global pandemic that has resulted in 4.5 million people quitting their jobs in the United States in the last month has resulted in people leaving jobs with long shifts. I bet that this has also affected people in TSMC fabrication plants.

2. It is possible that being on call at Intel requires fewer hours of attention than being on call at TSMC. It is also possible that Intel is offering higher starting salaries than TSMC, given that Intel is in a position of relative weakness.

3. You don't actually know if Samsung has been doing "just fine" recently in the United States. I'm sure it did in 2018 and 2019 and the beginning in 2020. I'm very skeptical that Samsung has been humming along without incident for the past six months.

View on HN

Right. I’m hearing US citizens have become “practically ungovernable.” I’ve definitely experienced people acting with more hostility and clear inner turmoil just out running errands than ever before now. And this is enough to shock me after living a decade in one of the most hostile, large metropolitans in the US.

I am hearing that employers in the US are no longer able to negotiate the low pay per hours of work, often at undesirable times of the day and week and year, that they used to be able to demand.

The type of work described in the article has a reputation of low pay per hour and being undesirable.

> TSMC will have to change to an eight-hour work day five days a week.”

Is this US society breaking down and American people being “ungovernable”? Or is it people being able to negotiate reasonable pay to working conditions ratios?

This is what happens when the US tries to compete with Asia on manufacturing in a free market.

These are people who want that job to exist, but are unwilling to work for the pay and conditions necessary for that job to exist.

TSMC knew all of this and came here anyways...

The us does not offer competitive infrastructure to allow for those kind of job conditions. Working 10-12 hours means you need either good super reliable child care or a spouse that does not work. The us does not offer the same level of reliable public services as Taiwan does for example

> This is what happens when the US tries to compete with Asia on manufacturing in a free market.

Does you definition of free market come from the "you'll work as much as I need you to if you want to eat" camp or the "if you want me to work bad enough, you'll pay me what I ask and negotiate the hours I am willing to work for you" camp?

Free market is the ability to choose from either camp, with majority picking the former.

Yeah agree. After reading more of the article I’m wondering if it’s more of a hit piece than anything else. Az has plenty of semi industry. TSMC may just want to back out. Edit-or maybe TSMC wants pretext for some eventual reason like backlash. Edit 2-or it could merely be an author looking for a story or a competitor looking to smear TSMC. People do have a way of seeming All around horrible until some missing criteria is changed-like better pay or giving them some leeway.

Two things can be true though and may not be related.

I think they are just unrelated...

I don't really see it as a hit piece, all sides here sound reasonable. It will be interesting to see what the end solution is. I think that the author would have shown a strong opinion on how to resolve it if it was a hit piece.

I agree. As usual, the headline overstates the article. The actual article (mostly sourced from anonymous online comments...) doesn't sound nearly as alarmist. Just a new business unit working out the kinks.

it implies a perception of what it means to be governable to one group of people.

Their version of governable seems to mean compliant.

It's not inherently good or bad but it is a particular perspective that I can't see working well in some cultures.

Compliant means showing up on time and working per the agreed upon terms.

Compliant does not mean accepting piss poor pay and poor work life balance.

exactly...compliant is a two way street.

Compliance assumes there is an underlying agreement or need to comply.

Characterizing TSMC not being able to find sufficient people to accept their working conditions/pay as "US workers not being compliant" is a meaningless use of the word compliant in this context.

I'm talking about the article, I have little to no insight on TSMC beyond this article which says things I find to be highly suspect.

there is an underlying agreement...just because it isn't directly stated doesn't make them not real. Social contracts arise from cultural norms and very much are a thing.

> I’m hearing US citizens have become “practically ungovernable.”

The OP article, IMHO, smells a bit like misinformation. There are interests (especially in the US) which want to see a never-ending stream outsourcing to "low-cost centers". Stuff like the article provides fodder for that point of view by painting a false picture that americans can't measure up.

> ungovernable

Interesting word choice.

Supposedly, the word "ungovernable" was used by anticolonialist/anti-imperialist factions in the '70s to describe a deliberate strategy of breaking down the "peace, order, and good government" that their imperialist counterparts offered as justification for their existence. Closely related is "no justice, no peace". However, this attribution of "ungovernable" to left-actors came to me via a right-source, so I'm not completely sure about it. If true, however, then I think you're implicitly reaching back to that era, to conjure images of South Africa and Uganda. I think the recent coinage of "Brazilianization" has a similar goal. Anyway, I would be very interested if anyone could help trace this sense of "ungovernable" to its source.

Some possible leads:

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-p... and its sources, particularly

[2] King, Anthony, ‘Overload: Problems of Governing in the 1970s’, Political Studies, XXIII (1975), 284–96. ;

and

[3] https://ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Soc924-2011/Offe%20--%20Ungover...

and its sources, particularly

[4] Fluno, Robert Y. (1971), “The Floundering Leviathan: Pluralism in an Age of Ungover- nability.” In: Political Research Quarterly, 24/3: 560-566.

These are all "establishment" sources though; there are no real Left sources so far -- though [3] does say,

> Ungovernability is a peculiar concept. It has been used both by academic political sociologists and by journalists and politicians; it has played a role in New Left as well as neo-conservative discourses.

so I think it should be possible to see where it went (and came from) on the Left.

EDIT: I now also find these:

[5] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/become-ungovernable

[6] https://dailypost.ng/2021/01/22/us-were-ungovernable-protest...

Who knows what the latter source is though.

There's also, uh, this insanity [7]; it's so far off the deep end it could be a right wing false flag, but, well, it's from 2021, so anything's possible:

[7] https://itsgoingdown.org/16-things-you-can-do-to-be-ungovern...

EDIT: Yeah, I think it's real.

Below is to point out that causation is being thrown around way too much with respect to the pandemic, not that the conclusions are incorrect.

> A global pandemic that has resulted in 4.5 million people quitting their jobs in the United States in the last month

4.5 million people quit their jobs and there was a global pandemic. 4.5 million would need to be compared to historical rates to say the pandemic resulted in an increase of X people quitting their jobs, not the total of 4.5 million. But even that X increase is a correlation and I highly doubt that the pandemic was 100% responsible for every single one of those individuals quitting their jobs.

A more complete story can be found from the bureau of labor statistics.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

> Over the 12 months ending in November 2021, hires totaled 74.5 million and separations totaled 68.7 million, yielding a net employment gain of 5.9 million.

I still agree that the idea of bullet 1. is likely valid, that people are leaving jobs that are undesirable and getting better ones - but I'd be careful to add the reason why. Causation has been thrown around casually during the pandemic to influence policy without any evidence of the causation or the magnitude of that causal relationship. You could just delete "A global pandemic that has resulted in" and the sentence would stand alone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com