Before this week's announcement of the first-ever worker-focused funding, advocates for workers in the semiconductor industry had called on all corporations receiving federal funding from the CHIPS Act to use the money to support workers.
Last October, CHIPS Communities United (CCU)—an alliance of dozens of labor, environmental, social justice, civil rights, and community organizations representing millions of workers and community members nationwide—sent a letter to industry executives. The letter urged companies building chip-making fabs with CHIPS Act funding to avoid repeating the "industry’s well-documented history" of harming workers, among other concerns.
The CHIPS Act "provides $52 billion in grants and loans to rebuild a sustainable domestic semiconductor industry and reinforce critical US supply chains," CCU told semiconductor executives. "Unfortunately, the Act doesn’t specify criteria for assuring that workers and communities impacted by this initiative also receive proportional benefits from this taxpayer funding."
To build a better future for the US chip workforce, the Department of Commerce will also be creating a Workforce Center of Excellence (WCoE) to manage ongoing workforce funding opportunities.
In addition to fostering partnerships with workers, the WCoE will collaborate with "industry leaders, researchers, educational institutions, government bodies, workforce development organizations, nonprofits, unions, and other training providers to address the industry’s workforce challenges," Natcast's press release said.
These talks will ideally help all stakeholders understand how to meet "critical semiconductor industry workforce needs," efficiently scale "successful semiconductor workforce development programs," expand access to industry training and education, and cultivate broad interest in chipmaking, Natcast expects.
Cultivating broad interest will likely require protecting workers' rights. In their letter, CCU advocated for more accountability from companies receiving CHIPS Act funding. They've asked companies to make local agreements ensuring that a diversified workforce being tapped nationwide has equitable pay, protections against discrimination and harassment, reasonable job quality standards, workers' rights to unionize, state-of-the-art health and safety protocols, and clean air and water at facilities.
Failing that, the industry might struggle to attract all the workers needed to reach Biden's domestic chipmaking ambitions. CCU noted that chip factories already have a bad reputation for low wages, low-quality jobs, union busting, and workplace safety and inequality issues.
The White House has been meeting with some groups supporting workers ahead of the WFPA and WCoE announcements.
In February, Gay Henson, the secretary-treasurer of a labor union called the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, met with Department of Labor and Department of Commerce officials to discuss the CHIPS Act. Henson pushed for more investments in domestic workforce development to "build a sustainable domestic manufacturing base here in America for semiconductors."
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