Probably yes. Major manufacturing sites are often CONTINUOUSLY (24/365.25+) staffed with "12 hour" shifts that include overlap via a lunch and normal breaks making those at least 13 hours of on site time long. One body slot takes 4 people to fill that way, but that leaves zero slack for vacation, sick days, etc.
From a manufacturing standpoint, having to add an additional crew to a 24 hour schedule would also mean additional handoffs and opportunities for things to be missed. In my experience, manufacturing shifts are typically not more than 12.5 hours, but may bump to 16ish if there are calloffs and the like.
My understanding is that in the medical field, handoffs are viewed as large opportunities for mistakes to happen through miscommunication, and that's at least some of the justification behind having people work 12-24+ hour shifts.
It is not uncommon for factory workers to prefer 12 hour shifts and working alternating 3 and 4 day work weeks. That staffs a 24x7 operation with four crews of workers.
I've got a friend on the assembly line in Fremont. He says he doesn't mind the hours too much. However, they basically keep adding extra or overtime shifts to his schedule. I think right now he might be working 5 or 6 day weeks, and I'm fairly sure they're minimum 8 hours, and obviously with overtime could be several hours above that.
Sounds awful, but in some ways isn't that how manufacturing has sort of always been?
For 24x7 production operations, 12 hour shifts make a lot of sense. You work 12 hours, hand off your role to the next incoming shift, and 12 hours later they hand off back to you. You do this for 3 days one week, 4 days the next. 4 hours of OT every day. I did this for 2 years at an LSI fab in Colorado Springs and it was great.
Interesting. That might work assuming workers get an appropriate amount of rest. I know it works well for nursing staff to have longer shifts. There's definitely a cost to handing off tasks, though I expect this to be near zero in a factory setting.
I just know that people get really dumb when they're tired, and it's the same kind of dumb as oxygen deprevation where people actually think they're not effected.
I'd be curious if these 12 hour shifts are preferences for personal reasons, or if there are measurable benefits in the factory as well.
Umm manufacturing, think of healthcare. It's not uncommon for inpatient nursing to do 12-hour shifts and doctors do seven of days/nights of 12-hour shifts.
But they may be able to hire additional shifts or work overtime on existing production lines.
Not every plant is run at a constant 24x7 three shift schedule. There are plenty of businesses that keep some slack in their manufacturing to respond to changes in demand as part of their corporate strategy, especially if they think there's an opportunity to gain market share.
Nor even terribly unusual--even in US manufacturing. Longer than 8 hour shifts is simply a matter of scheduling--you then wind up doing things like 4 days on/3 days off.
However, when you pass 40 hours, you owe people overtime in the US. I imagine that TSMC isn't particular stringent about documenting that in Taiwan.
Yes, that's reasonable, schedules may be more complex.
This aspect (required rest schedule) was not very well researched. The only data I've got was collected by the IT and engineering companies, and they could only measure working-day-long spans.
It's been a few years but I've known a number people who worked on the production lines at Intel's fabs in Hillsboro, Oregon. Many, if not all of them worked 3 twelve hour shifts each week. As I understand it the schedule is pretty common in production facilities of this type.
Note: I'm not commenting on the suitability of the practice, just on the fact that it's not unique to certain countries in Asia.
Many of us work in spaces where servers are expected to be working and running 24/7. Yet our bosses still want every single employee to have butts in seats 9:00 am to 5 pm, 5 days a week and in the same time zone. Sometimes with a little guilt-tripping on the side for taking sick days and vacation.
Wouldn't we be better off with several shifts, 4 days a week, covering Monday through Saturday or even the entire week?
> That said, this sort of arrangement seems to be extremely rare in the US
No, this is pretty common in government and government contracting. It's called an RDO: "regular day off"... more commonly known outside the US as a "rostered day off".
When I was a contractor we had even more flexible arrangements: we could work whatever hours we wanted, as long as they added up to 80 every two weeks. Eventually this got abused enough it was cut down so you could shift at most 10 hours between week 1 and week 2, but you could still, say, work just four 10-hour days every week.
Not everyone would be off the same days. In one position I worked we did 12 hour shifts that included a paid lunch. The schedule was 3 days work 4 days off, then 4 days work 3 days off. In a two week period you actually worked 84 hours instead of the normal 80 hours in two week. The difference though was we accomplished a lot in the 3 or 4 days of work because there wasn't enough time in the week to procrastinate too much. Keep in mind this was a 24/7 team environment and it was organized so that your alternates (people on opposite schedule) would take over anything you didn't finish and vice versa.
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