Inspectors found few violations at TSMC site despite safety claims
Arizona inspectors have found few workplace safety violations at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company construction site in north Phoenix despite claims of serious safety problems and a difficult work culture there.
Inspectors discovered lack of ventilation in locations where workers were exposed to carbon monoxide. They also were exposed to silica dust.
Carbon monoxide poisoning can deprive the heart, brain and other vital organs of oxygen, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The agency also said the inhalation of crystalline silica particles puts workers at risk of lung cancer and kidney diseases, among other ailments.
State officials claim they can’t release all of the safety evaluations done at the sprawling work site, though it’s not clear what else those might show.
Since November 2022, the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health has conducted two main inspections at the site, one of which prompted a follow-up.
In addition to the inspections, the state also conducted an “evaluation” in September mandated by a workplace safety agreement signed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, state investigators and TSMC officials in August.
The occupational division said its inspectors “continue to visit the facility” since the agreement was signed. The agreement came out of concerns about safety and injuries at the facility and puts TSMC through a regimen of safety training and annual inspections.
The division released the reports of the two main inspections in response to a public records request from The Arizona Republic, though it took more than a month for them to do so. But officials there refused to release any records from the evaluation visits, saying they were exempted from the Arizona Public Records Law.
The Republic has challenged that denial, and sent a letter from the news organization’s attorney demanding the release of the investigation under the Arizona Public Records Law.
The inspections that were released found only four violations at the job site that has about 12,000 daily workers. Those workers are core TSMC employees and workers engaged through unions and subcontractors.
“TSMC is deeply committed to workplace safety in the operation of all our facilities along with each of our active construction projects,” said Chris Dotts, a spokesperson for the company. “TSMC also conducts its own internal audits of safety records against state and national figures.”
Some individuals who have posted reviews on Glassdoor, an online platform where current and former employees anonymously review companies, and on Indeed, an employment website, complained about brutal working conditions and a lax safety culture. They said those conditions might jeopardize the smooth running of the microchip factory that aims to put Arizona on the global tech map and wean the U.S. off microchips produced abroad.
A report by American Prospect cited a series of allegations of unsafe working conditions, including claims of workers’ deaths at the TSMC site.
The Republic could not find any evidence of deaths there.
The semiconductor fabrication plants are still under construction, with projected production of the first chips slated for the first half of 2025. But as construction continues through delays, union and workers’ grievances, TSMC maintains the strong support of state and federal leaders because of its game-changing potential.
For instance, state officials fasttracked the project’s environmental reviews. TSMC is applying for a grant from the CHIPS and Science Act’s $52.7 billion fund. It is supposed to go through a federal environmental review if it gets the CHIPS grant. President Joe Biden signed the act into law in August 2022 for semiconductor research, development, manufacturing, and workforce development in the U.S.
During a recent interview with The Arizona Republic’s editorial board, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., hinted that TSMC might skip the federal review, though.
He said such a review would mean the thousands of workers at the job site would have to stop work for days.
“That defeats the entire purpose of what we’re trying to do here,” Kelly said. “Those plants have approval from the state of Arizona. We don’t want to be duplicative here, and we don’t want to go through a process that they’ve already done.”
Besides environmental impact reviews, workers and unions say the fact that thousands of people work at the site daily makes safety reviews critical.
Unions also are in talks with the company with safety as a main area of concern.
“The talks are centered on putting together some type of project-labor agreement as well as workforce agreement that would outline how TSMC, the contractors and labor will address safety issues, training, delays, any types of things that can happen with this type of complicated project,” Brandi Develin, spokesperson for the Arizona Building Trades Council, said.
What workplace inspectors found at TSMC site in Phoenix
Of the four violations noted by inspectors, three involved exposure to carbon monoxide, records obtained by The Republic show.
The first inspection happened in November 2022 due to a referral by the then-director of the workplace safety division, Jessie Atencio. He directed inspectors to look into issues of air contaminants in a basement, including welding fumes, tool and vehicle exhaust, chemical products and smoke.
The inspection wrapped up after a follow-up visit four months later, and inspectors found:
Workers were exposed to carbon monoxide from generator fumes while working in basements with inadequate ventilation.
Workers were exposed to silica dust while dry sweeping debris inside a fab, the industry name for the individual factory buildings.
While the first inspection was still open, the division received an anonymous complaint on Oct. 6, 2022, about the site. The state carried out another inspection due to the complaint months later, in January 2023.
“Complaints are handled as they come in while also taking into consideration whether they involve a fatality, imminent danger or high hazard industry,” said Trevor Laky, chief of legislative affairs and spokesperson for the workplace safety division.
The complaint alleged that the general contractor on the site lacked an evacuation plan for employees working in large concentrations.
It also made claims about poor lighting for those working on scaffolding, poor ventilation for contractors working in the basement, mosquito exposure and exposure to high-speed traffic on the job site.
Four contractors were mentioned in the violations noted by inspectors.
In three violations, inspectors noted that Greenberry Contracting LLC workers were exposed to fumes from a generator emitting carbon monoxide while working in places with limited ventilation.
The official inspection report states that exhaust gases of the generator contained more than 50 parts of carbon monoxide per million parts of air.
OSHA, the federal agency that ensures safe conditions for workers and enforces standards of working conditions, prescribes a limit of 50 ppm of carbon monoxide concentration at a work site.
When asked how far over the limit the carbon monoxide concentration measured at the facility was, a spokesman for the state’s occupational safety agency said inspectors did not actually measure the levels of the gas and only determined that the generators carbon monoxide.
“It could have been worded differently to indicate that the generator was producing carbon monoxide but no 8hour PPM was established,” Laky said.
He said Greenberry’s citations for lack of ventilation may be contested. He added that there was no abatement information on the citations because it was not a final order.
Greenberry’s director of business, Meghan Murphy, said the company would not comment for this article because it was in discussions with ADOSH about the citations.
Inspectors found employees of two other contractors, BHTC Arizona and Sundt Construction, were exposed to silica dust while cleaning concrete debris using dry chipping and sweeping methods.
Laky said ADOSH issued BHTC two citations and the agency was working to get abatement. Sundt was not issued a citation.
Sundt’s chief communications officer, Stephanie Teller, said the company has had no serious injuries or citations at the project, ascribing this to its “wellrespected safety programs.”
“Over the course of two years and many thousands of work hours, our team at TSMC has achieved outstanding results in both safety and quality,” Teller said. “When potential hazards arise, we work quickly to address and resolve them.”
A manager listed on BHTC’s company profile filed with the Arizona Corporation Commission did not reply to emails seeking comment.
Some former workers insist there are more safety problems at the TSMC work site than the inspections reflect and that it was impossible to see some of them in
produced the few hours of a review.
One former equipment technician, who did not want to be named because he did not want to jeopardize any future relations between his current company and TSMC, said some simple safety issues exemplify the culture at the work site and an inspector may not necessarily see this.
The former worker said he was working up a ladder once when a supervisor climbed behind him to bark instructions.
The same day division employees were conducting a safety inspection, the former worker claimed they gathered in a room at the facility along with other workers for a safety training.
He said one of the workers asked about rumors that someone had died while working at the site and the trainer refused to address the question. The man persisted and was removed from the meeting.
The claim about death at the site was part of a letter written by Aaron Butler, president of the Arizona Building Trades Council, to the White House. But the union told The Republic it had no evidence of fatalities.
If a fatality happened at the facility, it would have major repercussions, among them the invalidation of the agreement signed by Hobbs and TSMC officials. That agreement hinges on three things not occurring:
A fatality that resulted, in whole or in part, from noncompliance with OSHA standards. OSHA is the federal agency tasked with ensuring safe conditions for workers while also enforcing standards of working conditions. Arizona is among the states that have their own workplace safety programs, using OSHA’s standards and operations manual.
The employer exhibits a pattern of noncompliance with OSHA standards, i.e., a continued pattern of serious hazards identified during compliance or consultation visits.
The employer fails to correct hazards identified during compliance inspections or consultation visits.
If workers have sustained serious injuries while working at the facility, TSMC is under an obligation to report it to the state, said Richard Gleason, an associate teaching professor emeritus at the University of Washington.
Gleason, who worked with OSHA on federal and state levels in Washington for 13 years, said the severity of any industrial injury would determine if the state initiates an immediate inspection or not.
A complaint of serious safety violations to OSHA in any state from a current worker is normally treated at the highest priority level, he said, and likely would trigger an immediate inspection.
Current and former workers were unwilling to go on the record with their concerns because they said speaking individually without the protection of a union could harm their careers.
Some former workers said they had to sign nondisclosure agreements when they left the company.
Dotts, the TSMC spokesperson, did not answer questions about whether the company makes employees leaving the company sign nondisclosure agreements. She also did not answer questions on whether TSMC ever has reported serious injuries to the state.
Dotts said TSMC is regularly audited by the state against known safety standards, the most recent of which was the evaluation completed on the site in September. The results were among documents the state won’t release.