Workers at a Japanese-owned electronics factory in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin were on strike over pay and benefits yesterday, stopping work for the third day, a worker and the company said.
It was the latest in a spate of work stoppages in China, where laborers who have traditionally accepted low-paying assembly line jobs have recently risen up to demand better pay and conditions.
Beijing is normally quick to crush mass protests, but labor strikes have spread this summer as the government tries to restructure its export-driven economy to become more self-sustaining though measures aimed at increasing the incomes of ordinary people.
In Tokyo, Mitsumi Electric Co spokesman Yoshitsugu Murakami said production at its Tianjin factory has been stopped since Tuesday, apparently after factory workers walked out, demanding improved working conditions.
Workers at the factory — which employs about 2,800 people — are unionized and they have submitted a list of requests, which Murakami declined to elaborate on. Company officials are currently trying to assess the situation. He said he did not have information indicating a major rally at the factory.
A worker, who gave only her surname, Wang, said employees at the Tianjin Mitsumi Electric plant were demanding pay raises and better working conditions.
“We’re on strike because the factory has never increased our wages and they keep increasing our workload. It’s too tiring,” she told reporters.
Factory managers yesterday called workers and told them not to report to work, Wang said. But she was unsure whether workers were negotiating with the company and whether she should go to work today.
Another worker told Xinhua news agency that a new hire makes 1,500 yuan (US$220) a month, working six days a week with two hours of overtime every day.
Phones rang unanswered at the factory, which makes electronics appliances parts ranging from audio tuners and antennas to power switches.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts