Intel selects German city for EU semiconductor plant Intel has reportedly opted to build a new chip manufacturing mega-fab at a site in Magdeburg in eastern Germany, after considering locations in France, Belgium, Poland, and the Netherlands. The chipmaker has previously said it was looking to invest up to €80bn in new semiconductor fabs in Europe. Germany was high on the list …
My company has bought a couple of German companies, and my boss is even German, managing faculties in China, the US & Germany. Yet German labor laws make it really expensive to operate there, so much so that my German boss is letting the German facility contract from attrition and move most of it's functions to the US, leaving just a small R&D unit there. We are three years into that process, which will be completed in another two..
hup hup hoo indeed,
I am sure you know income inequality is higher in Britain than in most or all EU countries including Germany.
And the USA is of course the world leader in that respect.
You could download the World Inequality report 2022 here: https://wir2022.wid.world/
But there is also a lot on YouTube to choose from, this for instance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjwhnhtCwsM
The UK's Income Inequality Crisis Explained
Labor is a fairly small and shrinking component of the cost of operating a fab, which is dominated more and more in every generation by the building and equipment (which has hit $20 billion for a modern leading edge fab)
If the labor laws cause it to cost 1-2% more to operate in Germany that's not an issue as they'll get that back and plenty more from EU subsidies to build it, and have less tariff risk.
Some of their labour laws can lead to insane situations. I know of an organisation that caught someone in the counting room stealing cash, and because the person was popular with the staff the staff management (a peculiar, very German thing for large companies that I still don't quite understand) nixxed sacking him.
That led to the IMHO utterly bizarre situation that they did not only have to employ this person again, but even in the exact same position..
Then again, I recall a London Tube driver who was sacked after being caught drunk on the job being reinstated by the drive's union, so maybe there isn't such a big difference at all.
There are advantages, especially with high skilled staff. Since they know they have a job for decades you can invest in them and they can get a deep knowledge of your business.
Here where a developer can, in theory, just not come back after lunch. You don't invest in employee training or development and no employee with any sense is going to waste time learning any skill that can't be traded for a higher salary somewhere else.
So you are always rebuilding your stack on the latest buzzwords because that's all you can hire/all your existing devs will work on. If you need any "legacy" (ie >10year old) skills you are going to be paying through the nose for a consultant.
“To possess a white elephant was regarded (and is still regarded in Thailand and Burma) as a sign that the monarch reigned with justice and power, and that the kingdom was blessed with peace and prosperity. The opulence expected of anyone who owned a beast of such stature was great. Monarchs often exemplified their possession of white elephants in their formal titles (e.g., Hsinbyushin, lit. 'Lord of the White Elephant' and the third monarch of the Konbaung dynasty).Because the animals were considered sacred and laws protected them from labor, receiving a gift of a white elephant from a monarch was simultaneously a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because the animal was sacred and a sign of the monarch's favour, and a curse because the recipient now had an expensive-to-maintain animal he could not give away and could not put to much practical use.”
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