It wasn't just intel, it was every semi-conductor manufacturer in the valley (hence the inability to find other work).
They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it.
These people were disproportionately minorities, disproportionately well-represented by unions, and had made a lot of progress in improving their working conditions re: use of terribly corrosive chemicals. All of that backslid when labor went off-shore.
Now, the taxpayer has to pay Intel $8.5B to bring back manufacturing capacity to the U.S.; nice job, if you can get it. It'll be really interesting to see who takes these jobs, and how quickly we can rebuild the muscles that Intel shareholders profited from decomposing.
TSMC is paying around $23/hour to manufacturing technicians in Arizona. They’re also sending people to Taiwan to get trained and apparently it’s brutal enough that most people drop out of the program.
You can do better than that flinging burgers at Dicks here in Seattle.
That’s wild. For something that requires a trip to Taiwan for training, which I imagine makes it not an easy job, why does it pay so little? I’d think retention would be important if the training is that intensive.
It's because in Taiwan that's standard compensation for this field, and for that specific project it's TSMC. They don't want to pay US rates if they can avoid it, and it's possible that their company would be unprofitable if they had to.
> They don't want to pay US rates if they can avoid it, and it's possible that their company would be unprofitable if they had to.
Ha, ha, ha. No.
Let's see, from Wikipedia. 2022 data:
- Number of employees: 73,090
- Net income: US$27.67 billion
Which gives us: 27.67e9/73090 = 369,407.57
So, just looking at their net income (which already takes into account the salary costs of said employees), they could afford to pay every employee US $370,000 a year before being unprofitable.
Between US $50,000 and US $370,000 there is quite some margin for improvement. And clearly, the low wages they pay have nothing to do with the risk of being unprofitable.
Semiconductor manufacturing is very capital intensive so running the company as a nonprofit is a nonstarter.
You've presented historical data to counter the of argument that wage/salary growth MAY lead to potential unprofitability solely on the basis of one year's profit numbers. That's literally driving forward looking in the rearview mirror because it says very little about how profitable the company would be if it raised wages/salaries. At best it may be a first order approximation of how profitable the company would have been in 2022, if it paid people more then. However, even for 2022 the calculation isn't as simple as dividing the profit by the number of employees and keeping the company profitable.
Hiding behind "it's complicated" is an over-used excuse to avoid a more critical look at a problem.
A one year point is a crude approximation, but it does illustrate the order of magnitude mismatch between what they could pay their employees vs what they actually pay them, which was the short point being made.
More broadly, TSMC had no problem shelling out $9.9 billion to shareholders that same year (or $123,000+ per employee). So the argument of saving every penny because of the "capital intensive" nature of their business is also out the door.
And complaining about a single year estimate in the case of TSMC is barking up the wrong tree. They've had net incomes in the billions at least since the beginning of the 2000s.
So no, in the case of TSMC, they have no reason to pay wages below what is considered a "living wage" in Phoenix, Arizona.
Our markets, not even remotely isolated to semiconductor, are saturated in these bloated old businesses that are running on the razor's edge of financial ruin, yet every quarter are paying out catastrophic amounts of money in stock buybacks and generous compensation packages for the executives running them into the ground. It's beyond fucking parody at this point.
Also I wonder what the excuses will be once all the underdeveloped nations do what China did and actually develop. We have a finite number of exploitable countries on the planet with workers willing to work for pennies to assemble products. At SOME POINT this party is going to end, it has to.
The effect of globalization is that the west is bringing the rest of the world over the poverty line at the cost of deteriorating ourselves. Hard to say how this will end.
Ok then perhaps offer a better approximation, let's say 50% of profit instead of the 100% share. That is still a very decent wage and is on top of the existing labour expense which profit has already accounted for
Companies have absolutely non incentive to do this. TMSC turned that profit in 2022 with wages as-is, why would they spend more on wages if they don't need to?
Don't get me wrong, I wish companies were incentivized to do right by their employees. That's just not how the world works, companies only need to do the bare minimum to get the job done and leave as much profit on the table as possible.
- what if the EU writes a rule and then fines you for breaking it as a percentage of revenue? You can't have no money available for the future. You need a huge amount of money available for the future, as otherwise a company that pays its workers less (but still retains them) will beat you eventually
- why would anyone invest in you for the chance of no return? It's a high risk strategy to put $1m on a number in roulette for the chance of making a fortune; it's a ridiculous one to put $1m on a number in roulette for the chance of getting your money back
As a tangential point of comparison $23 per hour is a common rate for nannies/baby sitters in Atlanta Georgia without a degree or development certificate. One we use is a former teacher who disliked the work.
You may not have been making pizza where the $23/hr employees were spending their money.
Plus, they can only eat so much pizza. Having more of them switching to pizza making would not necessarily raise their wages, i.e. a glut of pizza makers should depress pizza making wages.
they already have that, it's called dominoes. there's still a market for tattooed freaks with culinary opinions throwing dough and poking a fire with a stick
It's wasn't just the semi-conductor manufacturers either.
The PRC had the supply chain from the bottom up (to some extent funded by the western consumers and corporations), whereas the US is trying to get reindustrializd from the top down, without first building a solid fundamental. To make the tough jobs easy, you must have the easy jobs done well first.
Exactly. That's why this has everything to go wrong. You cannot create the talent and the supply chain needed for this with $8B. The US needs to solve much more fundamental things like their schools and the local supply chain to even have a shot of creating a successful chip business again.
Recall, it takes years to build these fabs. Fortunately, people will be more likely to spend years in grad school training for these jobs, if they know that when they graduate there will be fabs to hire them.
Rebuilding is a chicken and egg problem, but it’s not as hard as defeating the axis powers in WWII. If this country has the Will to do something, it’s gunna get done.
This is harder than defeating an enemy militarily. Defeating someone militarily is relatively simple to do; and every country figures it out from necessity. It is an expensive process, but ultimately mainly about deciding that the high price is worth it (and if the country can afford it/has the industrial base to sustain the effort, but neither of those things can be changed in a conflict).
Building a profitable industrial chain is significantly harder to do and much rarer to achieve. The US certainly has the people to do it, but it isn't clear that the political trade-offs will be acceptable.
Also remember that the US was at the top of its industrial power during second WW. This time has passed long since. Nowadays it would have a hard time outproducing China and Russia, so I don't think that even a world war would be a solution (not considering the fact that a new WW could be the end of the world itself).
> They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it.
This doesn't make sense, Intel did and still does most of its manufacturing in the US, didn't it? (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...) I assume the thing that changed if there was a major loss of jobs was automation, not outsourcing. It's a lot easier to keep a clean room clean if you don't need to let people (with their hair and dead skin particles) in.
Their DoD and Dod-adjacent business (read: high-nanometer) processes are largely in the U.S.
Their consumer and server business (read: low-nm) processes are largely international.
The wikipedia page you linked evinces this statement.
The phrase "most of its manufacturing" is a Simpson's Paradox statement. It's true, but not in a way that's interesting. High-nanometer processes are easier to automate.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole to try and find manufacturing stats per fab, and it's pretty difficult to find.
First, it's worth noting that most of the <300nm fabs in the U.S. are really new. The Oregon facility was historically the most relevant fab, Arizona seems to be (potentially?) supplanting it from a design and capacity POV.
But the Israeli fab really shouldn't be discounted, they employ 12k people in Israel. I can't find numbers on production output, but that headcount is a similar OOM to the Oregon plant. Most of their successful, recent designs came from Israel, too. The Ireland fab employs 4.5k people. There's 22k in Oregon, unclear on the breakdown of manufacturing and R&D/non-manufacturing roles.
As I understand it from said rabbit hole, they do a lot of design and "proofing" manufacturing of low-nm processes in Oregon, but rely on Ireland and Israel to scale-up.
It seems that the recent (i.e. post-9/11) Arizona plants are more geared towards high-volume production. Regardless of what calculations went into those decisions, they're a hedge against political instability in Israel.
Add the numbers get bigger and the risks increase, the number of "cheap labor" countries where investments in large tech infrastructure are safe is shrinking every year. Maybe South America? Intel has (had?) a fab in Costa Rica...
South America is very underrated. People still think about the region in 20-30 year old stereotypes, but most countries have gotten much more stable, economics have improved drastically. Workforce is highly educated, different countries share a very similar culture and mostly speak the same language, which means that a lot of things can be scaled much easier. Of course, there's also Portuguese, which is still somewhat similar, and Quechuan languages speakers who learn Spanish as a second language, but this doesn't change the equation much.
The only thing the region lacks is investment and ecosystem to attract and protect it.
Venezuela's perpetual political/economic fuck-ups (going on 125 years at this point? [0]), Argentina's recurring currency fuck-ups, some really nasty left-wing vs right-wing spats between countries, and a generally weak rule of law / judiciary (in comparison with executive branches) deserve mentioning too.
South America could stand to learn a LOT from ASEAN -- stability = international investment = economic growth = happy people = stability.
I hope it sorts itself out! And I know Columbia and Brazil are developing some impressive technical industries, especially since they share North America timezones. But it should be honest about the headwinds.
The problem is that the “stability” and invesment interventions from the USA has typically come with some rather unpleasant strings attached. I think it’s either patronising or ignorant to suggest that various Latin American countries policy decisions weren’t made with that in mind.
>They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it.
How about asking the workers in other countries who benefitted from this transaction if they were happy with the arrangement? Or do only Americans matter? Maybe you think foreigners are fit only to till dirt fields as subsistence farmers?
> How about asking the workers in other countries who benefitted from this transaction if they were happy with the arrangement?
I'm sure they were happy with the arrangement, they benefitted from it in the short-term. You should speak with Foxconn workers today, though. The story is more nuanced.
> Do only Americans matter?
This is a weird claim to bestow on my original post.
Labor conditions matter. The balance of power of power and profits between labor and capital matters.
I promise you, semiconductors did not move production to ${foreign_country} out of the goodness of their hearts, to better the living conditions of ${foreign_country}'s impoverished underclasses.
They did it because the balance of power (and profits) had shifted towards labor in this country in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and the population of ${foreign_country} was cheaper to exploit.
It's also worth pointing out (again) that a disproportionate of people in manufacturing in California semiconductor industry were 0th or 1st generation immigrants (from the Philippines, Mexico, China and so on) or internal refugees from the Jim Crow South who migrated to California for military work during WW II. These were people who were literally at most 1 generation removed from subsistence farming.
> Maybe you think foreigners are fit only to till dirt fields as subsistence farmers?
Again, a weird claim to stick me with.
Humans working in manufacturing should be free to negotiate living wages, safe and healthy working conditions, reasonable time off and retirement policies, illness/disability insurance, and so on.
The reason U.S. companies prefer "foreigners" (domestically and abroad) is not because foreigners don't deserve these things as much as any other person, it's because they know they can get away with exploiting them for a few decades before they develop class consciousness.
In the last few years, workers in China have been striking to demand what workers in California fought hard for 70-80 years ago.
Entirely coincidentally, Foxconn began "diversifying" its manufacturing capacity into India and other countries. Do you think it's because they want to help uplift people from subsistence farming? :)
There's a certain irony in the point being made by that person because they think it means organized labor is good, and lack of it is cheap and bad.
Those workers could get the job done just the same without the overhead of labor unions, and this person still thinks that the 'cheapness' means that organized labor is magically better.
You won't get an earnest answer though. Perhaps some nonsense about how these workers would be even better off with organized labor (until their jobs move to the next, cheaper bidder, of course).
That’s the power of slave labour. Global economy is really modern day slavery. When you are making trillions in USD in the USA, paying someone in china $2 a day would’ve been an Egyptian pharaohs dream.
Those "slaves" have generally become quite wealthy. The median wage in Taiwan is close to the UK (it has been higher in the past), and China has moved out of poverty and steadily improving which is a pretty reasonable proxy for all of Asia (India has some catching up to do, but they'll get there).
This is the same tired argument that was made when the US pushed these jobs off the continent - if the very low wage jobs are allowed exist; eventually enough wealth will be generated that nobody needs to do them. Those sweatshops are in fact a path to prosperity. In some sense it is a cosmic win that all the capital was developed in Asia because they needed it more, but that probably wasn't the sort of charity that policymakers intended at the time.
>>Yup nowadays we import the product not the slaves.
I think you may be undermining what slavery was .
I have met folks who work in workshops in India that export stuff to USA and other developed nations. Those workers make a whole lot more money than their neighbors who produce for the domestic market and they have better working conditions. Their overall quality of life, while nowhere close to G8 standards, is so much better. And their community benefits from their increased wages.
The people who flagged this comment must believe that someone working at McDonald's for low wages is the same as someone being held as property, their family members terrorized, raped, beaten, whipped, murdered, etc. at the whim of their legal owners.
It's amazing to me the number of people ranting at each other about this, when it seems like straight up BS. Intel's current and past manufacturing sites are not in low cost of living locations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si... There are two exceptions: one in China, one in Malaysia, but that is two out of dozens in the US/EU/Israel.
And even then, Malaysia has a bigger GDP PPP per capita than Chile, Bulgaria, Uruguay, and only slightly behind Greece! Quite a bit above Mexico too! They aren't a low-cost country.
>> Honestly it blows my mind they were able to give control of one of the most important industries in the world over to a foreign country like that.
The engines of capitalism only look 1 quarter ahead. And the politicians who support them only look up to the next election. Unless you are majority or largely controlled by your founders, who care about building a good legacy.
Sounds like there is a market opportunity for long term disrupters. We are seeing it on the high end (SpaceX, Tesla) and on the low end a bit (Origin USA). Maybe if you can examine each industry infected by MBAs and see which ones have had enough quality fade caused by their rot to maybe disrupt?
Market investment is ultimately determined by plausible narrative, and by the national narratives at the broadest level.
That is, if your industry is tuned in to the investment climate, the things being pursued match the things that people are saying "will make the country great", and are backed up by legislation and financing deals.
In the previous era, the US was focused on a deindustrializing narrative: the things that made America great were "clean, high-tech" industry, high graduation rates and four-year degrees, and an outsourced empire that brought sprawling supply chains together "just in time".
The new model has brought back the industry, so it needs an emphasis on concrete job skills, versus academic credentialing. It's in-sourced so the supply chain has started in on a radical shift. It emphasizes new energy sources with few foreign dependencies, moving the geopolitical stance towards isolation. The approach to the national balance sheet also has to change, but precisely how lacks for consensus.
Like with the previous shifts there were some reasons to take the narrative in a certain direction: late 60's America had many environmental concerns, and fell into an energy crunch in the next decade. "Smart bombing" the Middle East to secure oil supplies brought together the national industries towards a common goal, and the money supply got a reset early on with the end of Bretton-Woods, that helped propel the Boomer generation towards homes-and-families participation within the system.
Today we're still putting together the pieces of that narrative, but it's central to the political climate: the old two-party system is focused on exhausted narratives that don't actually excite ordinary people to vote. Therefore the candidates are rushing to put together platforms that rewrite the script and mobilize new demographics.
Exactly. It's why authoritarian and/or single-party nations have so much more potential to succeed. It's why China did so well for a while. However, in practice, as we've seen with China and others, authoritarianism only works well when the people at the top are really smart and don't have some major character flaws (i.e., the "benevolent dictator"). Eventually, you get a dictator who's a narcissist or moron or fruitcake and it all falls apart. In that case, the best case is that the inner circle will murder him in his bathtub and select a better leader before he ruins everything.
Benevolent dictator is still just a dictator. As he grows older, he cares more about staying in power than following current trends. China wanted to prevent this with their 10 year rule for the general secretary but Xi changfed that and that was his biggest mistake.
Democracy's weakness (politicians focusing just on next election cycle) is also its biggest strength. It allows change and adaptation.
No, a benevolent dictator is the best form of rule. If he cares more about staying in power than anything else, then he's not benevolent.
There have been many historical examples of benevolent dictators. I can't think of any in modern history. Xi certainly isn't, and never was.
Democracy can avoid the problem of dictatorial systems by allowing the people the ability to get rid of bad rulers, at the expense of usually getting crappy rulers who only focus on the next election cycle, and frequently getting sociopathic narcissists in power.
Yes, you certainly can. It's happened many times in history, thanks to hereditary rule (i.e., they inherited these positions, they didn't actively seek them). Queen Elizabeth I of England reigned for 40 years and is considered by historians to be a very good ruler. Marcus Aurelius of Rome was also considered very good.
The problem wasn't these rulers, it was what happened after they got old and died and their shitty kids replaced them.
It has? Russia has a dictator now who's obviously some kind of narcissist, and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. His hold on power is tenuous at best, and there's a good chance he'll be deposed before long.
>> i find this rise in nativistic and jingoistic sentiment weird. comparative advantage exists for a reason - we are not going to be the best at every single step of every single industry.
There are more considerations than just profits. Consider how domestic PPE plants closed down in the US because even US gov institutions wanted the cheapest product, and went overseas. Then when COVID hit, we had no local supplier for PPE.
This is common sense and has nothing to do with nativism or jingoism. The offshoring was an action of pure selfish greed at the expense of the working class people who built the industry.
> Now, the taxpayer has to pay Intel $8.5B to bring back manufacturing capacity to the U.S
The tax payer had nothing to do with it. This is yet another example of the government taking our money (or borrowing our future money) and spending it in ways that we never agreed to and had no input on.
Find me a candidate that had any input on this Intel investment that campaigned on giving billions to Intel to onshore chip manufacturing.
Maybe they do exist, but I don't remember it coming up.
Also to clarify, local elections wouldn't have helped here. Congressional and presidential elections are a different beast, The Machine (reference to the University of Alabama) heavily influences elections and elected officials. I do vote, but I have little faith that such a massive and heavily funded political system allows my vote to count for more than winning a seat. I've been regularly disappointed by those I've voted for when they inevitably ignore or break promises they campaigned on and make decisions that often fly in the face of the very principles they originally claimed to stand for.
If this is Biden's initiative, then the alternative is Trump? I'm sure there could be a technocratic rational non-idealogical third party that would get a bunch of HN voters but does any viable third party actually exist?
Fixing our education system is a lot bigger problem then we've ever been able to tackle as a country by popular initiatives.
The fact that Trump and Biden are the two candidates we've been offered is a sign of a much more fundamental, and disappointing, problem.
I don't think anyone would agree that those two are the best candidates this country has to offer, and most people I've talked to about the election feel stuck picking between which one is less bad.
You sound like you’re agreeing with the statement. What is your syntactic point here? That the taxpayer has nothing to do with the decision making is irrelevant the point you responded to. They still pay for it.
Technically we haven't paid for new spending in tax dollars since Clinton was in the White House, its hard to say taxes pay for something when its paid for with debt.
That said, my point was that the tax payer isn't really paying for it when the tax payer has no say in what is being paid for. If the taxes are collected either under false pretense, or no pretense at all, for what the money will be spent on then the citizen is only responsible for paying the tax bill. The money is the government's at that point, and responsibility for how it is spent at that point stops at their desks.
If the tax payer were truly the one paying for this, we would at minimum have a voice in the program. At best, the government would propose the plan and leave it up to the tax payers to fund it in almost a kick starter type of approach. A simple vote would make more sense IMO, but if we are to pay for it with tax dollars and the government refuses to run a surplus, tax payers (should) have to kick in more money to pay for it.
Acknowledging the complexity inherent in how the U.S. gov't finances initiatives.
However, eventually, the buck stops at the taxpayer.
Yes, the federal gov't issues bonds to finance their activities (i.e. deficit spending), but the creditworthiness of the U.S. is intrinsically supported by the federal government's capacity to collect taxes from its citizens.
Eventually, "we the people" foots the bill. It might be amortized over decades and deferred more years still, but it's still a debit to "we the people" of $8.5B in the ledger.
I'm honestly not sure if that is the case anymore. With a purely fiat system we really can't afford to pay off the debt, doing so would remove money from the money supply and could lead to an economic contraction.
I'm no sure what would happen economically if we paid off federal debt in any meaningful amount. I'd be really curious if you have any insights into what that would look like.
I do think we can pay off the debt. It would require an increase in taxation that would cause an S&P 500 contraction.
When it comes down to it, it'll be a political choice between cutting Social Security benefits (absolutely no way this happens) and a highly progressive tax on the country's wealthy.
I don't think the first one is going to happen, and our two party system is so totally dominated by the country's wealthy population that we'll never even see a vote on the second during peacetime.
One route is to "grow" our way out of debt, and those hopes are pinned on some blend of nuclear fusion and "AI, AI, smth smth, AI".
Failing that strategy, I think that spiraling U.S. debt is one of the features that greases the slide towards WW III. :/
Last time around, we needed WW II to rebalance power between asset owners and renters in this country – it literally required a global, existential struggle to get wealthy people to pay taxes. I'm afraid we're on the same track today.
> I do think we can pay off the debt. It would require an increase
> in taxation that would cause an S&P 500 contraction.
I was very worried about the huge deficits from the Reagan era. But when Clinton was elected, and he raised taxes, I thought we were done for.
Surely, raising taxes would cause the economy to contract more, which would lead to even less government revenue, a higher deficit, ever more impossible to service, etc etc....
Well. Imagine my surprise a few years later when the deficits turned into surpluses.
What I had forgotten to take into account is that raising taxes causes the interest rates to go down--if the government isn't borrowing billions and trillions of dollars, i.e., if the demand for debt goes down, the price of debt (i.e. the interest rate) also goes down.
So an upper middle-class guy may have gotten his taxes raised by a few thousand dollars--but he just refinanced his mortgage from 10% to 5% and saved a thousand dollars a month. (Yes, interest rates for mortgages were that high, and higher. My Dad bought a house at $14% interest rate in the 80's).
I remember reading an article in the Wall Street Journal by a guy who was scared to death of the surpluses--in a few decades, he said, we'll no longer have any 30-year government bonds. How will Fannie May and Freddie Mac be able to subsidize 30-year mortgages? How are we going to use Black-Scholes to calculate the correct value of derivatives if we don't have a measure of the zero-risk interest rate??
Alas, the supreme court threw away Gore, and installed Bush as president, where he solved those "problems" in very short order.
I think one part that’s missing from this narrative that’s otherwise solid is that the Clinton administration raised taxes while simultaneously expanding globalization (NAFTA, expanded ties with China).
Nowadays, we’d be raising taxes while globalization is contracting. On-shoring is inflationary, because the same goods as before cost more.
Raising taxes in an inflationary environment is scarier than raising taxes in a deflationary environment.
> Raising taxes in an inflationary environment is scarier than raising taxes in a deflationary environment.
I know it can be scary, but, we are going to have to muster the courage to try unorthodox things--like actually paying the bills. Raising taxes in an inflationary environment can be a very beneficial move. Why? Higher taxes reduce demand, which helps fight inflation.
This takes some pressure off of the Fed. The Federal Reserve only has a very few policy tools to control inflation or to stimulate the economy: basically they can either rase rates or lower rates.
But if inflation is being controlled by increased taxes, the Fed doesn't have to raise interest rates as much--or even at all--to control inflation.
And a lower interest rate means that companies can afford invest in things which will increase profits and will raise the productivity of its workers. Which fights inflation.
In addition, higher taxes means lower deficits, which means the government isn't hoovering up all the money available for investment. It will issue fewer bonds, and people who would have bought those bonds will have to start investing their money in actual productive businesses. Which also helps inflation.
It doesn't have to be a doom spiral--we can spiral up if we just stop buying into the notion that we can get out of this if only we make the deficit large enough.
I mean I totally agree with you, I just don't think there's political willpower to swallow the pill and actually pass legislation that would increase taxes.
Because, all else equal, capital owners (who set the policy agenda in Congress) would prefer to keep their wealth continue rolling the dice until they can't anymore.
Its easy to forget--but we are the many; they are the few. And Trump hasn't quite succeeded in rendering our votes moot. Capital owners can only control congress by persuading us that we should let them.
I believe its a very good thing that we have billionaires--look at what China's economy did once they let some people become billionaires. But in China or anywhere else, there are only billionaires because we believe that their existence benefits us--that we are better off if there are billionaires around.
If it doesn't benefit us to have them around, eventually we will all figure that out and change things so that once again they do benefit us.
They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it.
These people were disproportionately minorities, disproportionately well-represented by unions, and had made a lot of progress in improving their working conditions re: use of terribly corrosive chemicals. All of that backslid when labor went off-shore.
Now, the taxpayer has to pay Intel $8.5B to bring back manufacturing capacity to the U.S.; nice job, if you can get it. It'll be really interesting to see who takes these jobs, and how quickly we can rebuild the muscles that Intel shareholders profited from decomposing.