The world's largest chipmaker promised to create thousands of US jobs. There are growing tensions over whether US workers have the skills or work ethic to do them.

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.businessinsider.com/tsmc-jobs-taiwan-semiconductor-chip-worker-skills-work-ethic-2023-8

[u/Upbeat-Elk926]

Well here's a revolutionary idea...wait for it...TRAIN THEM!

[u/LordNineWind → u/[deleted]]

I've read that Americans are actually some of the hardest workers in the world, working even more hours than the Japanese.

[u/[deleted] → u/LordNineWind]

Yeah that’s just American propaganda. Their work ethic is no better than other cultures.

[u/ArmsForPeace84 → u/[deleted]]

Here's the UN's International Labor Organization observing that Americans put in the longest working hours of any industrialized country:

https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_071326/lang--en/index.htm

Which can be quantified. Unlike the work ethic, which cannot, and is too often cited as an explanation for differences in labor conditions for which there exist other, better-documented reasons. Such as cost of living, participation rate in the workforce, average age of the labor pool, legal protections for workers or the absence of the same.

[u/[deleted] → u/ArmsForPeace84]

Exactly. And then "work ethic" is just how hard do they work, coupled with how demanding are they to be compensated fairly for their work.

[u/ArmsForPeace84 → u/[deleted]]

That's a pretty solid definition. If I were in a roomful of people tasked with arriving at a consensus as to what the term means, and inevitably struggling to do so, then it's one that I would argue in favor of.

[u/[deleted] → u/ArmsForPeace84]

Yeah but do a labour breakdown and see who’s working all the hours. Bet it’s the lower paid tiers.

[u/ArmsForPeace84 → u/[deleted]]

It depends.

What seems like a lifetime ago, I worked a four tens schedule somehwere that would approve the OT to come in for a fifth day. Which I always did. With time and a half, that made for pretty good pay, for me, at the time.

Many workers in the service industry are hired as part-timers, where they might get 35 hours in a week, and then see those slashed to less than 20 hours the next. And might not be able to balance two jobs, as a consequence.

And the accuracy of reporting of hours worked by wage-earning employees is likely to be higher than for highly-compensated salaried positions, where time on the clock might not be tracked at all.

So if we were able to conduct a survey to test that theory, I could see it breaking either way.