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The company I worked for did a good enough job so that if you poisoned yourself they could plausibly say you were in violation of SOP. To be honest, I don't know what you could do to fix a lot of the dangers in semiconductor manufacturing. Many of them are just inherent to the process. Avoiding super carcinogenic resists is the low hanging fruit. Maybe there are a few other places where you could use safer, more expensive chemicals. But you have to have arsenic. You have to have HF. There's no known safe alternative.

I think the biggest thing you could do is remind the technicians that their safety is paramount, even when we're line down waiting for a critical tool to come back up. The pressure to restore a multi-billion dollar fab to production is intense, and it can cause people to cut corners on safety.



In your experience, did you find there was a independent, empowered worker-safety advocate in the decision line?

As you note, I seem most of the dangers not coming from dangerous chemical, but from management pressure to sidestep SOP in order to make quota.




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