Hundreds of employees of state-run firms staged a protest yesterday, calling for the government to clarify their status and ensure that they are provided with the benefits to which they are entitled.
Demonstrating in front of the legislature, the protesters — union members from several state-owned enterprises, including Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電), Taiwan Sugar Corp (Taisugar, 台糖), CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 中油) and Taiwan Water Corp (台水) — accused the government of failing to enshrine their rights and clarify their status under the law.
They urged the government to clarify whether they are classed as civil servants or workers.
Pan Hsin-chung (潘興中), secretary-general of the Taipower union, said that due to the vagueness of their status, employees of state-owned companies are not entitled to labor pensions under the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法).
At the same time, Pan said, they are also not entitled to the monthly pension civil servants receive after retirement or the preferential 18 percent bank deposit interest rate that civil servants receive.
Worse still, he added, employees of state-owned companies are nevertheless subject to punishments designed for civil servants should they misbehave.
Pan said that as a state-run company employee, he feels like an orphan, sacrificed on the one hand to a twisted legal structure, while being misunderstood by the public on the other.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained