The higher fertility of TSMC semiconductor workers
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> If you provide childcare services to your employees, you may be eligible for this general business credit. It covers qualified expenditures for a childcare facility and for childcare resource and referral.
> The Employer-Provided Childcare Credit offers employers a tax credit up to $150,000 per year to offset 25% of qualified childcare facility expenditures and 10% of qualified childcare resource and referral expenditures.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
As a rule of thumb, US companies don't care about workers. Employees are considered an expense to be tolerated.
Before someone tries to present a contrarian view, I implore you to run a thought experiment with your employer - if share price/margin/profits drop tomorrow, what will they do? Layoffs/cuts or ask shareholders to accept lower returns for some time?
Doing good things on principle is in dire need of being reinvented, perhaps on first principles again.
Eventually the doing for yourself ruins the whole world. We keep sliding down these chutes, ever more convinced to do for ourselves first, as things get worse & worse socially. Even Ford understood he needed to not just create workers for his factory, but a society affluent enough & well paid enough to buy cars. We no longer have that basic sense.
True. Having the retirement funds of gen-pop tied to the wellbeing of some unscrupulous mega-corps, leads to a prisoner's dilemma where governments and gen-pop are incentivized to ignore or even support the exploitation, societal damage and misbehavior of such "too big to fail" entities.
It becomes a form of mutually assured destruction: "you can regulate or fine us Uncle Sam, but you'll also be hurting the retirements of your citizens; are you sure you want to do that?"
From my taxes currently.
That's why you see shareholder lawsuits against their own company when management does something dumb/illegal and the stock drops.
Shareholder Theory wasn't even a social norm in the US until the 70s!
I would take a salary below the market rate if the job came with free childcare, because I'd still have to spend the money and I'd potentially save time on my commute.
This idea that companies "don't care about workers" is absurd. If anything other than the TC for a job has ever mattered to you, the company offering the thing that mattered has probably saved money on your salary.
I’m religious. I want my kids to have a religious daycare.
A friend of mine isn’t religious, but is an immigrant and wants her kids watched after by someone who can teach the kid their parent’s language.
Childcare is Gemeinschaft, not Gesellschaft.
Assuming companies don't want an entire workforce of parents for various reasons, paying at market and providing childcare benefits would be the only option. Then the whole shareholders win argument takes hold since income would go down. Most likely miniscule impact, but that satisfy some investor types.
Otherwise, government just has to require it for all companies over certain thresholds. And that becomes the cultural issue. For countries with smaller governments, I guess competition becomes the only venue. We are seeing more public-benefit corporations, which should be able to provide company benefits more easily than shareholder companies. And if startup performance finally picks up in this AI age (well, probably not ;), big companies might be incentivized to retain by providing more benefits.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...
In which countries do you think companies actually care about workers?
I live in Europe and none of the companies I worked for ever cared about the workers beyond the bare minimum they were mandated to by regulations and even there they were trying to weasel out of some (unpaid overtime, etc) because "the economy is bad" and "we're not competitive with cheaper countries". The moment I got a longer sickness I've been laid off.
Sure, some companies have more perks like Kindergartens for employees and pension plans but that's because they want to attract more competitive workers, not because they actually care about those workers. Their care about you is limited to the amount of added value you bring in, not on some moral or ethical grounds. Otherwise those same companies wouldn't be using sweatshop workers in the far east.
We're economic cannon fodder everywhere. The private sector exists only to provide innovations and return on investment to shareholders or owners, not to care about workers, that's the government's job.
Meanwhile, I know several people limiting their family size due to economic constraints.
They want the benefits of it without paying.
It's the same as hiring/training juniors/apprentices (in all kinds of jobs not just tech) etc. Companies want experienced people but don't want to pay to train them, in that case the workaround is to poach someone after they've gotten experience.
Of course when every company is poaching and nobody is hiring juniors you start to see shortage of experienced people.
edit: maybe this is why everyone is trying rush LLMs into some roles.
Companies should not be what holds up society. It gives them too much power. It also amplifies the divide between haves and haves not.
The issue is the Right to Work states. If your childcare is tied to your employment, and you can lose your job at any time, you then can lose your childcare at any time. That sets up incentives that become rather ugly rather fast.
Add in that there are typically long wait lists for childcare, the emotional ties, childcare workers' incentives, and the costs that are universal for the US. It's not even close to a simple decision for anyone.
Personally, I wouldn't use such childcare if it were comparable to other providers. It would have to be significantly cheaper or free to consider it.
You don’t need childcare if you have free time due to not being at work..?
I'll add that about 40% of children are born to unwed mothers in the US.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276025/us-percentage-of-...
And, again, many daycares have moths/years long waiting lists. Daycare is a super local thing in the US and, in my experience, not really all that tied to CoL standards. I've personally been in year+ lists and have had friends where you can pretty much walk in and get started. It's quite variable.
1. Everyone wants the “best” for their kids. When I think of the “best” childcare, I imagine some specialized program with excellent caregivers and a multitude of enrichment opportunities. I don’t think of a company-run daycare.
2. Many people don’t live near work. You want your kids’ friends to live nearby.
3. You want to provide stability for your kids. Tying daycare to your job is antithetical to that goal.
You’re assuming two things:
1. The “best” thing is scarce.
2. Everyone agrees on what the “best” thing is.
People want to send their kids to the best place within the framework of their own opinions on what “best” is. Just because two people work for company X doesn’t mean they’re likely to agree on what a good daycare is.
> Secondly, how many people remember their daycare friends?
How is that relevant? When your kid wants a playdate, you want their friends to be nearby to facilitate that.
> Third, how offered something free tied you up?
Nothing is free.
Daycare and coffee just aren’t equivalent.
A third or so of the women in Taiwan are of childbearing age. If every woman at TSMC was in the same age bracket then the 6x difference would "only" be a 2x.
I don't recall ever seeing a nice rundown of why birth rates have collapsed in the most abundant era of human history but I doubt it is as simple as TSMC offering childcare. People have done more with far less on the children front over history.
"The higher fertility of ( $ Wealthiest Company in the Country ) workers" ?
Would that makes it easier to understand? Not to mention TSMC employees have decent social status in Taiwan. Well Paid and High Benefits by Taiwan Standard, and tends not to do layoffs for stupid reasons. Long terms planning and Institutional Knowledge is important at TSMC. Unlike Intel 2009 - 2021.
We know the EUV machines are produced by ASML
We know ASML optics are produced by Zeiss.
So what is it?
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10265812...
Intel: USD$77k for a hardware engineer role (low i know - Intel have had 20years of wage freezes and they has an across the board wage cut last year). Link: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Intel-Corporation/job-titles/Inte...
TSMC: Pays the Taiwanese equivalent of USD$58k for the same role. Link (in NT$ but conversions easy): https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/signal-integrity-eng...
Now before you say aha! that's less on a direct dollar to dollar comparison remember that Taiwan has slightly better than 2x rate of PPP.
Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, TSMC in Taiwan has better pay, working conditions and benefits than Intel in USA. The childcare mentioned in the article is one such example as is the pay i just mentioned. This has been true for a long time now. Intel is the primary Western competitor and they don't compete for talent at all. They haven't done for a long long time now.
Equally fascinating is why it goes away (Japan in the 90s, Intel recently).
I have been trying to figure out TSMC in particular but haven't yet, and I'm skeptical of anyone who claims it is one simple thing, or even anyone who claims they know all the reasons.
They’ve been working for a long time to reach this superior position and made good decisions business partners and investments along the way. These investments in local national economies take time, decades. I agree with you, IP is reductive where I think there is a combination of tangible and intangible factors, trade secrets, talent, operational discipline, management and long term thinking.
It’s hard to see in present time, but it becomes clear in retrospect when the winning companies started making failing decisions while on top. Then doubling down on those poor decisions or switching strategies too frequently to make an effect.
It is even more infuriating when you see a big player makes a bad decision, but it takes years to see the effects (on the market for example).
ASML makes the film.
Zeiss makes the cameras.
TSMC is the movie studio. They'd be making hit movies no matter who was supplying the film and the cameras.
ASML - cameras
Silicon - film
TSMC - film house (manufacturing, color correction, managing storerooms, mastering, distribution brokering with theaters)
Taiwan - Hollywood with just the right climate for talent and business
Fabless chip firms - movie studios
Chip designers - writers
Specialized modular chip IP - actors
… the analogies really break down from there…
Are software engineers the ad agencies and the code execution just the generation of value by playing the movie for people???
It's maybe more like ASML's machines are like a Stradivarius, and TSMC is the best in the world at playing the instrument.
intel has tried to compete with them - they have their own ip, machines, and processes. but they are totally missing the consultancy and full package access that TSMC has, and they have failed.
The fab itself, for example, you can't just setup a Twinscan in your garage. Even the floors are marvels of engineering. Culture is another subtle but huge factor. When chasing nanometers the fab becomes sensitive to things like deodorant and cigarette smoke. You can of course mitigate these issues, but having an aligned and motivated work force makes it easier.
I understand that this is a sensitive process but so is surgery which robots are able to do with remote control.
Manufacturing is a game of yields and margins. When you have thousands of operations and inputs, small changes have big effects. TSMC and Intel both have access to the same machines, it's what they're doing with them that differs.
Robot surgery is tolerant of a much greater length scale of defect than a modern IC chip and is orders of magnitude fewer process steps.
Try to watch a youtube video or something but even then you won’t see the full picture. There are so many layers and the wafer passes through different flavors of the same processes over and over.
If you're giving me stats, you'll have to explain why there's very little correlation between income and fertility within nations, and why previous (non-farming) generations had a higher fertility rate with fewer resources, and why a country's fertility generally declines as it becomes wealthier.
Think of a bank underwriting a 20 year mortgage. Are they going to originate a mortgage if they aren’t confident in your future income earning potential? Same thing, but parents are doing the underwriting of originating the child liability.
[1] https://www.population.fyi/p/job-security-lasting-choices-bi...
[2] https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
And if it's not an economical issue, what are we to do? Force people to have children? Artificial insemination?
This is just silly argument to make in discussion. OP presented coherent viewpoint, and asking “for a study” is a simple way to derail any discussion.
Also, as childless/1 child families grow old and retire, they kind of show how it's ok to live a fulfilling life without going through arduous pregnancy and etc. I'm not even talking about sacrificing minimum of 6 years of your life (pregnancy + first year of the child) to raise 3 kids. Culturally it's not celebrated anymore, you lose out on career progression, and since others in your age groups aren't having kids, you feel left out.
These are very real problems that no government has been able to solve yet. The worse it gets, people will feel more guilty for prescribing their future child to a life that was worse than theirs. And the cycle continues.
I believe if a government really thinks fertility rates are an issue, the only think it should do is make it materially easier for citizens that want kids but can't to have them. Any other policy I can think of feels incredibly authoritarian.
And the whole “travel, party, drink” isn’t as morally insulting as it used to be before. I think a good chunk of people in their 20s would wear that as a badge of pride, rather than whatever they’re trying to imply.
That’s something of a self-correcting problem, don’t you think?
If you think this is a problem and want to fix it, you either need to make traveling etc. less attractive, or make having kids more attractive. The people currently making a fuss about it seem to think they can just lecture people into changing, which is silly.
Lucky enough for humankind this is self-correcting problem on both local and global level: people with partying genes will become extinct.
Humans aren’t fruit flies. Very little of our behavior has simple genetic controls in general and our brains are famously flexible based on our experiences. It’s also complicated in this case because deciding whether to have children involves any of the same skills people need to be successful in life: it’s a multi-decade commitment and so the problem is hardly “self-correcting” if it means that most of the children are being had by people who don’t make major life decisions rationally. Fortunately, most of them would be the ones choosing to party instead.
But seriously, can we stop trying to over-simplify everything into neat little black and white boxes because grey areas annoy us, and contradictions scare us half to death.
Can we just be at peace with the fundamental interconnectedness of things, and understand that causality can run in two (or many) directions at once.
Though you or I may act individually according to our instincts or beliefs or morals, a group including you or I may act according to systemic patterns and drivers. More than one thing can be true at once!
Once you understand that, perhaps the question can shift from who is responsible for this thing I don't like, to how can we influence change and should we even? and why? and how congruous is this want or need with the multiple levels of truth, cause, and effect acting on each other?
* op comment changed after I wrote this. it said people just want to have fun and drink and travel (and.. because there's nothing else to do).
Regardless, article acknowledges TSMC accounts for 20% of Taiwans GDP for 0.3% of population, that kind resources per capita for family friendly policies can't scale. I'd be curious to know actual TFR of this cohort i.e. most affluent famillies I know below 2. Including most religious/conservative who has all the resources (maids etc) to have big families but don't. IMO short of god mandating at least 3 kids, TFR settles belows 2 because most don't want to handle more than 1-2 kids, no matter how wealthy they are. I guess people don't want to drive minivans.
Also does this pattern hold for Samsung who accounts for 20% of SKR GDP and employs 0.5% of population?