i ain’t gonna lie, this is very funny
I have a friend who is a project lead there and…yeah, this is basically 100% the case. It is practically documented policy honestly, because the US workers won’t deal with the hours that the Taiwan staff is willing to put up with. Execs have complained to him on a few occassions as to why they can’t seem to hire/retain enough staff, which I think is why they just started bringing in Taiwanese workers.
H1-B visa workers are easier to exploit than citizens & permanent residents.
I bet it is rather that they prefer people who are more familiar with their own culture, language, expectation of work ethics and so on. Skilled workers on work visa can be sourced from all over the globe but they only want Taiwanese.
Which is inherently discriminatory. Especially when their lawyers have absolutely told their executives that and they could care less.
I thought that goes without saying:
- They already have connections in Taiwan, so that’s the easiest workforce for them to draw from.
- They have closer language & cultural ease with fellow Taiwanese people than people from anywhere else in the global labor market.
But this article isn’t about Taiwanese H1-B visa workers vs other H1-B workers, it’s about H1-B workers vs domestic workers. The fact that almost all those H1-B workers happen to be Taiwanese is a bit of a red herring.
You and @[email protected] both are right
I find it kinda hilarious seeing white people face workplace discrimination for the first time in their lives.
the oppressed white people have to learn mandarin for a job
And it’s because they don’t work as hard as Chinese/ Taiwanese workers.
Once again proving the point that immigrants do the necessary jobs Americans won’t do.
You mean it’s easier to exploit Visa workers, because what are they going to do? Stand up to a corporation who sponsors them staying in the US?
The workers are more “efficient” because they are working longer hours under threat that if they don’t perform, they’ll be shipped back to Taiwan. The suit explicitly states that the company is also focusing on unionized positions in order to disrupt union activity and weaken their bargaining power.
That’s not “working harder”, that’s exploitation. If a farm forces a slave to work 14 hour days with minimal breaks and safety protections, they’ll be more “efficient” than an 8 hour paid worker. Doesn’t make the situation good in any way.
Critical support for any and all these problems to keep popping up.
Among the allegations in the complaint are that TSMC’s HR team in Taiwan sends the U.S. arm of the company the resumes of candidates that have already been vetted and can work in the U.S., and then the U.S. team “simply hire these Asian/Taiwanese candidates without question, even if no open roles have been posted in the U.S.”
I don’t really see how this is a valid complaint, the Taiwanese workers are just easier and more efficient to train into their processes because there’s no language or culture gap.
The suit also claims that a desire for Mandarin or Chinese language skills have been listed
Just learn Mandarin, f**kers. IDK how y’all think learning some Mandarin isn’t necessary to work in a Taiwanese company.
First the Western press complained about how long TSMC construction was taking. Now they complain about the work culture, about TSMC not training English-only American workers, even though those two factors are the reasons why the fab is being built at a decent speed. These uncivilized Asians just can’t do anything right /s.
If the USA wants to make these inefficient requests of TSMC now, they should have made all these desires clear beforehand. If they did, TSMC may not have been as eager to go through with the US fab. Changing the deal afterwards is a classic American bullshittery.
Mandarin or Chinese
Are they implying Mandarin is not Chinese?
Either they’d also be happy with e.g. Cantonese or they’re hedging their bets and don’t know who they will offend by suggesting that Taiwan speaks the same language as the most common one on the mainland.
They could be differentiating between Traditional Mandarin, and mainland simplified mandarin which is more commonly accepted as “Chinese”. Especially since traditional mandarin is still the official written form of Chinese in Taiwan, as they rejected the Maoist era reforms.
The main issue is the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, which includes only hiring one race. Imagine the logic if a company said that they only want white employees because there would be less of a culture gap. I assume your reaction would not be positive. That’s a core reason why that law was passed.
The US isn’t making inefficient requests. Those are the laws that every company has to deal with. Unless the company’s lawyers were born yesterday, they are also very well aware of this.
No one changed the deal. This has been the law for almost 70 years. Basic research would have told you everything I’m saying. Stop making excuses for a capitalist corporation.
Could be fairly straightforward to have this situation without discriminating on the basis of race. E.g. by setting the expected qualifications and experience a certain way.
How many yanks will be proficient in mandarin, with experience in chip manufacturing, and a desire to live within commuting distance of the factory. And of those, how many stick it out for the long term?
The end result is the same but the Act of 1964 might be satisfied. I don’t know much about US law, tbh, but that’s how employers have got away with racism the other way round in my country.
I doubt it. There’s a reason why employers have American employees fill out the Department of Labour self-identification survey during the hiring process. If the government sees that nine Asian, six white, three black, and two Hispanic individuals apply for a position, and the company chooses to only hire eight of the Asian applicants, that would definitely raise red flags. Especially when the racial demographics of the company disproportionately represent Asian individuals. Its pretty easy to see what the company is doing in that case.
Further, the Supreme Court has ruled that it is not discrimination to hire on the basis of race if it affects the persons performance with the job. For example that’s why movie studios aren’t hit with discrimination lawsuits for rejecting black individuals when casting for Abraham Lincoln. But there is no way that a court would accept that a technician or engineer position is in any way affected by a person’s race.
Further, there is no legal argument that an engineer knowing mandarin in any way effects their performance, when a company worth billions of dollars avoid English translations of documents for their US based plants, with the sole intention to creating a discriminatory barrier.
The company has no plausible deniability here, and any court would see right through it. White owned businesses tried many of the same tactics with black individuals, and precedents have been set because of that.
Makes sense. I’ve also seen your reply about the actual suit, which seems to support this position, too.
Happy to help : )
It’s also nice that I can finally use my specialty of labour law here.
I don’t really see how this is a valid complaint
It’s discrimination based on race, it’s literal racism
Racism is systemic. This is just discrimination. I wouldn’t worry too much about this since affirmative action was attacked by their own supreme court.
If they want to keep working there, they can put in the same work the Chinese and Taiwanese workers put in.
English is not my native language, but I think there’s a valid distinction between systemic (an institution being racist) and non-systemic racism (an individual or individual entity being racist)
If this was an American company doing this in another country, wouldn’t we be calling this racist? I understand that there can be no systemic violence against white people in the US, but there can be discrimination (as you call it) against them. Also, like another commenter mentioned, what if other people (e.g black people) were discriminated against with this policy? Would you then call it racist instead of “just” discriminatory?
It doesn’t seem a meaningful distinction to make in this case, at least to me.
The person filing the suit, Deborah Howington, is a self-described American ‘Caucasian’. Racism doesn’t really exist for white Americans. Discrimination maybe, racism no.
The US wants this fab up and running fast, but they also want TSMC to waste a bunch of time translating all their operations over into English.
The more time they spend arguing over this stupid shit, the better.
That’s incredibly disingenuous. There are 12 suit filers in total, among which are Elena Huizar, a self described Latina woman, and Modupe Adesemoye, a self-described African American woman. Further, Howington is the primary suit filer because she was a hiring manager with the company, she isn’t some white woman crying about not getting a job. She approached a lawyer because she was told to discard the applications of non-Taiwanese individuals and American born workers applying for unionized positions. Did you even bother reading the suit?
A multi-billion dollar corporation could commission a hundred translators and have their entire operations translated in under a month if they wanted to. That wouldn’t even register as a rounding error in their budget and expenses. They’re pissy that a discriminatory scheme they cooked up to save costs and disrupt union activity is getting exposed.
Are you telling me that Taiwanese capital is opposed to workers’ rights?
Mfw when capital attempts to smash workers rights and unions no matter its country of origin 😔
But yes. Any form of capital rabidly despises workers rights if it prevents them from earning even one more penny. Who would have guessed lol
There is no racism against white people because white people inherently hold the position of dominant social power in settler countries. The institutions, system and overall nation is geared to work towards their interests and serve them. White nationalism is at the core of most settler nations, manifest destiny being one of the earliest examples you might learn. Racism is a systemic issue. Discrimination might be what you’re looking for.
You do realize that them not hiring other races/ethnicity also applies to Black individuals, Hispanics, Muslims, non-east Asian peoples such as Indians, and so on, correct?
You’re the one who chose to hyperfocus on white people. Do you think that there are no resumes from black or Indian engineers that they threw in the trash in favor of Taiwanese ones?
That would be true. This may be a Taiwanese company, but they are working under labor laws, agreements and such of this country which has institutionally baked in laws that are easily circumvented and have various baked-in loopholes who were written and made to service white individuals. There’s a reason for that focus.
Of course there were…I wasn’t denying that? That’s why it’s discrimination when it comes to white individuals and not racism.
While I generally agree, this has to be the one case where the law was purpose written with black individuals in mind. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was in no ways carefully crafted to give white workers an edge.
Also did you reply to the wrong person? I didn’t mention anything about racism in my reply? I’m not arguing on that point. I’m also confused at what you’re trying to say.
I’m not saying the Civil Rights Act is crafted to give whites an advantage. You’re assuming I meant that specific institutional policy in reference to this. I was speaking more of a general, big picture. I could also be assuming wrongly on what you’re assuming.
My specific train of thought from what I read that it was mostly white workers that were getting discriminated against in the workplace. I wanted to make the distinction that it isn’t “racism” against white people. For other cases, yes, it is racism. I don’t disagree. However, these capitalists are operating within the framework of a settler society. They’re using law and court that was designed AND created for AND by white individuals historically to also inflict grievances on minorities or protect their place in society while justifying their exploitation. The people aggrieved are using the Civil Rights Act to defend themselves, actually. With the chunk of white workers that are aggrieved and the original comment; I thought they were saying it is racism to discriminate against white workers/individuals or implying it was racism to discriminate against the whole group in which I thought was mostly white workers. If I’m wrong on that, I apologize and I’ll remove everything.
I also apologize for responding later, I was at work.
Umm. Not good. Seems to me the US is poaching all their people so when they instigate over and lose Taiwan they don’t even have to evac these people or worry about chip production in a decoupling scenario.
I also think it’s interesting that the thing to laugh about this factory 6 months ago was how American workers could never make it work and how it was going to fail. Now that they’re succeeding by importing workers we’re moving the goal posts? Come on, let’s be sober about it. There’s a real problem here and the US stands a real chance of pulling off a tech decoupling from China while maintaining capacity.
Is there any precedent to a situation like this? A goverment subsidized company getting sued by racisl discrimination… What happens if the lawsuit is succesful? Maybe this sets up the foundation for a future expropiation?
I imagine this has happened before. Government handouts to corporations and racial discrimination are as American as apple pie.
i guess they key difference is that its not a western company
critical support to TSMC for filibustering Amerikkkan plans to dekkkouple and the Amerikkkan labor unions for standing for their own individual rights against ROC work culture (if it were about importing Mainland BYD cars, I’d call them chauvinist)
They can both ratfuck Amerikkka’s ass
I expect discrimination at TSMC US factories will make TSMC fail in North America.
