Wal-Mart Canada was ordered by Quebec's labor relations board on Friday to stop intimidating workers at a store in the midst of an organizing drive.
The decision involves three cashiers at a store in the Quebec City suburb of St. Foy and is the second unfair labor practice ruling against Wal-Mart in Quebec since September. Earlier this month, Wal-Mart Canada, a unit of Wal-Mart Stores Inc, announced that it would close a store in Jonquiere, Quebec, where employees had unionized and were attempting to negotiate the first collective agreement with the retail giant in North America.
The board ordered Wal-Mart to immediately stop "intimidating and harassing" the cashiers in St. Foy. But it imposed a relatively light penalty: Wal-Mart must post the decision in the store's lunchroom for 30 days.
Nevertheless, Jossee Lemieux, president of Local 503 of the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union, said the decision was significant.
"Wal-Mart cannot violate the fundamental rights of its employees without paying any consequences," Lemieux said in a statement.
Andrew Pelletier, a spokesman for Wal-Mart Canada, which is based in Mississauga, Ontario, said the company took issue with the board's finding that its managers intimidated employees. But Pelletier added that Wal-Mart would not challenge the ruling.
"We feel the appropriate thing to do is not appeal," Pelletier said. "We want to comply and just move forward in St. Foy."
The labor board found that the three workers experienced varying forms of intimidation. One was taken into an office by the manager and an assistant manager who demanded the names of union sympathizers. Another was threatened with a negative job evaluation if she supported the union drive. In the third case, a manager suggested that the cashier retract a recently signed union card.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
RSS