Quote from: CraigK on February 27, 2023, 23:23:44My son worked on the Panasonic side of the the Gigafactory right after it opened. He had just graduated with a mechanical engineering degree when hired. He felt as though they were just glorified maintenance or service workers. Now he could tell me me a new story each day about how bad the place was with employees just hiding and sliding. Some would put more work into getting out of work than if they had just done their job. Now those can be normal growing pains for any business just starting up and having to work through the dirt bags. But by far the thing that disturbed me the most was that the Japanese really didn't want to give up any of their manufacturing secrets or shortcuts. The Tesla side was an open book but Panasonic would literally have people flying back to Japan and bringing parts back in their luggage so they could fix machines. No there are plenty of machine shops in Reno or Sparks they could have sourced the parts out to by simply sending the CAD drawings over. But they really wanted to hold on to control. Then the cultural difference where most of the Japanese crew would really just stick to themselves. My son said they were definitely hard workers but if an American worker had Tattoos they were thought of as thuggish or problematic. Panasonic seems like a decent company the benefits packages were good but my son left after about a year to a company where he felt he could apply his degree more. With the announcement that they will be building the big rigs here that just means a crap load more of out of state people will move here and create more problems. The roadsides are dirtier than ever the amount of homeless has skyrocketed and crime has certainly outpaced the growth. Some will call it progress but it just makes me want to move deeper into the mountains.
The Japanese themselves are now in a complete impasse, including creative personnel.
Literally last week they changed the legislation, which now allows foreign students to look for work in Japan for not 90 days, but 2 years. They changed the conditions of a residence permit up to 1 year from 3 years for specialists who have a degree and earning more than 149k$ per year. While ordinary people have been waiting for a residence permit there for 10 years. They have already forced to accept more than 6 million foreign workers, because their nation is bent in their own juice. This is what the closeness of the nation does is a gradual existential loss of more open society. Even the Arabs could not stand it and realized that this was the path to nowhere ...