The surprising reason few Americans are getting chips jobs now. President Biden is making a massive bet that he can bring one of the 21st century’s most important manufacturing jobs: making semiconductor chips. Now comes the greatest challenge of all: finding enough workers to make it a reality.

3 comments

1. >Already, the companies have struggled to hire enough construction workers, especially welders and pipe fitters. Factory openings are being delayed until 2025 or later. And the industry needs up to[ 70,000 new workers](https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/chipping-away-assessing-and-addressing-the-labor-market-gap-facing-the-us-semiconductor-industry/) to run the fabrication plants, known as “fabs.” These are not your grandparents’ manufacturing jobs. Many will be engineers and computer scientists. About 28,000 will be technicians who don’t need a four-year degree but do need specialized skills. 

   So huge numbers of good paying skilled jobs. And chip factories are just one of several sectors seeing a recent factory boom. Not to mention union workers getting significant increases in pay and benefits. All of this bodes well for revitalizing the US middle class. Thanks Biden!

2. This is actually huge as long as it doesn’t get derailed by some partisan bullshit in the next few years.

3. The actual fab jobs may be even tougher to fill. Not only do they require advanced and specialized skills, but those skills are not super transferable. Although they are reasonably well paid, opportunities for advancement can be limited. Additionally the working conditions can be more onerous than other jobs in similar or related fields; Fab workers are usually required to work extra long shifts, typically 12 hours at a time iirc, and the working conditions are extremely strict – particularly the need to keep everything totally clean, which imposes a lot of onerous requirements on the workers, such as wearing full body clean suits for much or all of their shift. And of course tolerances are extremely low, with little to no room for error, which can be a tough ask for people working 12-hour shifts in clean suits. We will need to train large cohorts of people to do these jobs, and be able to convince them to stay for quite a long time to make that investment worth it.

   These are not insurmountable challenges by any means, but they WILL require great foresight and intentional planning. By comparison, getting the places actually built is the EASY part.