The Clean Room

I got the chance to visit a manufacturing clean room recently.  I didn't actually get to go in the clean room but I got to see it up close through windows and was introduced to the gowning area, where I got to try on all the garb.  I do love that phrase "gowning area."  Sounds like maybe a coronation is about to take place.  Except the reality of it is about a million miles from that.  This brief tour really left a mark on me.  

To prepare for entry into the clean room, you must

• Stick each foot in the shoe scrubber
• Wash and dry your hands
• Wear latex gloves
• Don a bouffant (hair net)
• Affix a veil around your head that hangs from just below the eyes down just past the neck
• Wear a hood that covers all the way down over your shoulders, executioner style
• Wear a full-length jumpsuit (following the correct protocol so the sleeves don't touch the ground while you step into it) that snaps at the neck, containing the veil and the base of the hood
• Step into calf-length "boots" that have their own rubber soles that affix by snapping over your shoes, with protective material that extends up over the calf and attaches with another snap around the leg

That's it.  You're now completely covered, from head to toe, with just a small horizontal space for your eyes.  Are your hands sweating from the gloves yet?

Now you work a 12-hour shift.  Hold on - don't panic just yet.  It might sound worse than it is.

But probably not.

The clean room itself is very large, but no one works the whole room.  In fact, you work in just one of many large hallways within the room.  Each hallway contains the large machine needed to complete one step of the process.  A worker is assigned to only one machine/hall, so that's where you spend your day.  The rows are maybe 10' wide and 60' long.  There are various carts full of bins and other racks of things lining the sides of the hallways.  It's all not too unlike a hospital ward.  Some of these hallways are lit with that similar antiseptic white light, but many of them are lit with a strange orange light.  There's certainly no trace of sunlight.  The sound like that of computer cooling fans surrounds you.  Not excessively loud but elevated and relentless.  No one seems to wear hearing protection, maybe because that would just be the last straw?  The temperature and humidity in the room are always exactly the same.  The net effect here is sensory deprivation.  

You yourself aren't really making the semiconductors.  All that work is microscopic.  It's all done by specialized machines.  Your job is to simply load the machine, and then unload it when it says it is done.  Then you hand off that piece of the puzzle to the person in the next row who feeds it into their tool and passes it off to the next person and so on.  It requires training but is essentially unskilled labor.  Some days you're quite busy and on your feet almost the whole time.  Other days you're doing a lot of sitting around in that ridiculous get-up trying to find ways to kill time while your rods and cones get oranged to oblivion.

I don't think humans are made to do this.  That having been said, it's possible it isn't quite as bad as it sounds.  I mean, it's pretty bad, but I can almost see how anyone even does it.  Within that 12-hour shift, you get two, paid, one-hour breaks.  An hour is a pretty long break.  It's sort of human.  You have the flexibility to take these breaks whenever you want (as coordinated with your co-workers.)  Ideally, you could work 4 hours, take a break, work 3 hours, break, and then finish up the final 3.  There's an exercise room on site.  You could also just leave for awhile and go see life.

But could you do that and, after seeing actual living humans out in the wild, still force yourself to go back to the clean room for your next 3 hours, or would you just walk?  It might help if you think you're providing the world with much needed semiconductor chips.  At least it might help for awhile.  

Still, employers know this world of sensory deprivation is out of the ordinary, and I imagine years of turnover have led them to create a schedule that helps these clean room workers keep their sanity.  Sorry for all the math here, but in this schedule there exists a time when you'll have 2 days off, 2 on, and then another 2 off.  The schedule is 2 on, 2 off, 3 on, 2 off, 2 on... so the worst it ever gets for you is 3 consecutive 12-hour days.  With the two, one-hour breaks thrown in there, the 12-hour day doesn't seem too bad, but when you consider you have to wrap yourself in some kind of polyethylene pita and walk up and down the same hallway for the entire waking day... it starts to seem a little... badder.

Burnout is a problem in these jobs.  I don't think it's just the hours.  It really can't be that healthy to wear that stuff all day every day.  That orange light has to mess with your vision.  The pay is pretty base-level, but it's a job that provides benefits (85% paid anyway) and it's a steady employer.  I think people stick with it for a certain amount of time until it catches up with them that humans really aren't meant to do this - or if at all, certainly not for very long.  It's borderline psychological warfare that eventually loses the borderline.

In this particular case I think it's good news that the employer is currently hard at work trying to replace all these employees with robots.  I'm sure the employer is enticed by the payroll savings and work advantages of not having to have live employees.  Carting items from one place to another, feeding those items into machines, waiting for those machines to finish... all sounds like something robots would excel at.  The company is focusing on a better bottom line, but in some strange twist, this phasing out of human jobs seems merciful.  It might appear to be in the best interest of the company, but what I see is one less cruel circumstance desperate workers have to be subject to.