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As one of Fairchild’s employees put it in the exit questionnaire he filled out when leaving the company: “I… WANT… TO… GET… RICH.”
Chip firms hired women because they could be paid lower wages and were less likely than men to demand better working conditions. Production managers also believed women’s smaller hands made them better at assembling and testing finished semiconductors.
Fairchild was the first semiconductor firm to offshore assembly in Asia, but Texas Instruments, Motorola, and others quickly followed. Within a decade, almost all U.S. chipmakers had foreign assembly facilities. Sporck began looking beyond Hong Kong. The city’s 25-cent hourly wages were only a tenth of American wages but were among the highest in Asia. In the mid-1960s, Taiwanese workers made 19 cents an hour, Malaysians 15 cents, Singaporeans 11 cents, and South Koreans only a dime.
“God decided where the oil reserves are, we get to decide where the fabs are.”
These days, when we look five years out we hope to be building 5G networks and metaverses, but if Taiwan were taken offline we might find ourselves struggling to acquire dishwashers.
