PsecretPseudonym t1_ir1gsb1 wrote on October 4, 2022 at 5:19 PM

Reply to comment by Jojothewhale in Micron’s investing $100 billion to bring the country’s ‘largest semiconductor fabrication facility’ to New York by Avieshek

Once it’s up and running, I’d be surprised if there were as many typical factory jobs from this sort of work to form a union as some might expect. I get the impression semiconductor fabs are highly automated. It’s not like workers are laying down and connecting those transistors by hand.

kumatoras t1_ir1lzoa wrote on October 4, 2022 at 5:52 PM

It still takes a lot of people to run a wafer fab. Intel fabs for instance are highly automated but you still need folks to keep tabs on the machines and also folks to fix them. These factories staff quite a lot of people depending on their size, and the more machines you have, the more people you need.

SafetyMan35 t1_ir3q57l wrote on October 5, 2022 at 2:41 AM

Lots of maintenance, support and cleaning that needs to go on.

Warpig1497 t1_ir3wu3i wrote on October 5, 2022 at 3:39 AM

I've done alot of work inside of intel in oregon and you wouldn't belive the amount of people it takes to keep a semiconductor facility running, just in trade workers it employer thousands to keep the plant running at quality it needs to be running and as far as the fab goes all the tools and automation typically take someone to monitor the process and deal with any problems, and most every semiconductor being built in the US is built by union labor

Aeoleone t1_ir1icmt wrote on October 4, 2022 at 5:29 PM

You'd be surprised. I'm not familiar with how micron operates, but I've worked at one of their competitors; there's a lot of jobs in maintenance and facilities support. The big hangup, IMHO, is that there's typically a 2yr degree / military background requirement, so it's harder to just go into the field.

My department, for example, was on the middleish size, and was staffed to have about 56 full time shift workers, outside of the non-management engineering staff.