Several labor rights groups yesterday accused smartphone maker HTC Corp (宏達電) of overworking its employees to make a profit.
A dozen protesters, mostly in their 20s, demonstrated at HTC’s flagship store in Taipei, holding placards that read “high-tech bully” and “HTC sweatshop,” while chanting slogans.
Two students lay on the ground, covering their bodies with red paint and animal organs, in a symbolic demonstration of employees dying of exhaustion.
Chiang Yi-han (江奕翰) of the High-Tech Cold-Blooded Youngs, which organized the protest, told reporters that HTC had failed to address the issue of overwork, with many of the firm’s engineers and line workers working 12 hours a day to enrich the company.
HTC chairwoman Cher Wang (王雪紅) is Taiwan’s richest person, according to Forbes magazine’s billionaires’ list published on Wednesday.
Chiang cited the case of a 30-year-old engineer at HTC who died in his dormitory a day after working until 3am on Feb. 21.
“It is our humblest wish that when consumers hold a fancy HTC touchscreen phone, they would think more about how the phone was made and how the health, or even the life, of an HTC employee might have been sacrificed,” Chiang said.
HTC responded after the protest that it “will make sure its employees are respected and that it carries out its corporate social responsibility.”
Meanwhile, the Council of Labor of Affairs said yesterday that three special clinics had been set up to diagnose and treat cases of employees suffering from overwork, and another six would begin offering the service next week.
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
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