So Many Jobs, So Few Workers

○ In Ohio, America’s push to construct a slew of chip plants is running headlong into a labor shortage

- Cristina Lindblad

If you want to see what Joe Biden has called his “field of dreams,” head to the intersection of Clover Valley Road and Miller Road in Licking County, Ohio. Once you get there, you peer through a chain-link fence and around grassy berms at what on a recent gray winter morning looked like a sea of mud with a few bulldozers and some construction workers in hard hats and high-visibility vests. The cows in the nearby barn seemed more interested in their feed than the economic revolution unfolding next door.

Within a few months, those few dozen workers will grow into thousands, all assembling what the US president in his most recent State of the Union address promoted as one the most advanced semiconductor fabrication plants on the planet. The $20 billion Intel Corp. is pouring into that farm field is the fruit of a bipartisan federal effort. It aims to revive domestic chip production to ease what’s become a dependence on Asian imports and also to counter China’s drive to displace the US as the world’s tech superpower.

Plans for Intel’s complex in Ohio, its first major stateside project in 40 years, call for as many as 10 fabs to be built over a decade or more. An initial pair, due to be completed by 2025, will employ 3,000 workers. Putting up those buildings will require even more bodies: 7,000, give or take, according to company projections. 

America’s biggest foray into industrial policy since World War II faces one big hurdle that hasn’t gotten much attention but is becoming apparent at Intel’s Ohio outpost. Historically, the US has thrived because it’s had ample pools of labor—for reasons good (immigration) and bad  (slavery). But the time has arrived when America’s demographics are conspiring against its economic ambitions.