Do you have any sources for your claims or are you making stuff up?
Many, many Europeans do work in factories. Just ask the Germans.
What's wrong with working in chip factories anyway? They produce some of the highest margin products in the world and since they are highly automated, working in a chip factory requires certain knowledge and education on physics, quality assurance, automation, material science, and certainly give you experience that makes you a valuable worker with future perspects rather than a replaceable cog in a dead end job as is the case for the Europeans working in most other factories that are a few steps away from being off-shored to lower cost areas.
I have personal experience having been in a low end research fab.
The bunny suits and the protocols are elaborate.
It was only for few hours and it was quite uncomfortable, hard to see or get a sense of things around you.
Regular users would generally stay for several hours to make it worth it. No break, water, toilet or food, probably come in with an empty bladder and empty stomach and stay the whole day.
From what I have read, it requires specialised training and intermediate if not advanced level skills and relatively high level of education. You work on the same machines for years and they pay is not necessarily that high compared to the trouble that you put in.
In fact, even in Taiwan the challenge is that people often switch to chip design or software instead. This definitely gets harder as people age.
Yes it’s extremely toxic there’s a reason why manufacturing moved from the US (and probably EU/UK but I’m not certain). It’s horribly toxic and you can read this about Samsung[1].
Asia has what some would call almost slave labor and a complete lack of care for workers. Many countries don’t care about pollution either.
US and European countries will gladly clean up manufacturing at home while shifting to countries who could care less about employees or environmental impacts.
So I’ve seen conditions in some poorer nations in Asia be described as similar to slave labour, but we’re talking about Taiwan and South Korea aren’t we? These are high-income countries, so I’d be really surprised if they had such conditions.
I could believe EU has some stricter environmental regulations than both, though
Tons of people go work in factories making cars, chemicals, and food. If they could provide better shifts and working conditions they can potentially attract talent. Oil fields attract people who wouldn’t have gone into the industry if they hadn’t been offered better pay and family benefits.
Do you have hard numbers how much it would impact the bottom line to offer fab employees good wages and work-live balance? It's not like fabs are employing fast armies of low skilled labourers in sweatshop (even if you do sweat under PPA).
