Ch. 10 Transistor Girls (Chip War)

n the early days of the semiconductor industry, men were the primary designers while women were responsible for assembly. As the demand for semiconductors grew, the need for larger and cheaper labor forces also grew, leading to the rise of chip startups in the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco.

Charlie Sporck, an expert in productivity optimization, was hired by Fairchild Semiconductor after a union revolt forced him to leave his previous job at GE. He implemented efficiency strategies and gave most employees stock options as an incentive for increased productivity levels.

In contrast to the electronics firms on the East Coast, most of the new chip startups in the Santa Clara Valley employed women to staff their assembly lines. The 1965 immigration law increased the foreign-born labor pool and made it easier for chip firms to hire women at lower wages and without demanding better working conditions. Production managers believed that smaller hands gave female workers an advantage when assembling and testing semiconductors.

As demand continued to grow, chip firms began to look for even cheaper labor and opened facilities in locations such as Maine or on a Navajo reservation due to tax incentives. Bob Noyce even invested in a radio assembly factory near the border of Hong Kong, where wages were only 25 cents per hour. The Fairchild factory in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong, became one of their most successful facilities, producing high-quality semiconductors thanks to the trained engineers running the assembly lines.

Overall, the early semiconductor industry relied heavily on the work of both men and women, with men as the designers and women as the assembly workers. The need for larger and cheaper labor forces led to the expansion of the industry to various locations, including the Santa Clara Valley and abroad.

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