Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation’s largest telecoms operator, yesterday said it would consider making more temporary workers official employees by establishing a plan with labor unions in the next six months.
Chunghwa Telecom employs 2,392 temporary workers, mostly working in customer services, while the company employs 24,000 official employees.
“We will hold discussions with the board and labor representatives to come up with ways to improve benefits for the company’s temporary workers,” company senior vice president Sheih Chi-mau (謝繼茂) told a press briefing.
Chang Hsu-chung (張緒中), chairman of the Taiwan Telecommunication Network Trade Union (台灣通信網路產業工會), said the company should make its part-time workers official employees, as most of them are driving the company’s normal day-to-day business.
“Since Chunghwa Telecom would need employees to do this business all the time, it should make long-term temporary workers official employees that have the appropriate benefits,” Chang said at a public hearing yesterday.
The working environment for the company’s temporary workers remains difficult and unprotected, union representatives said.
“We have to work nearly 200 hours per month, with pregnant employees working the graveyard shift and not having the right to maternity leave after childbirth,” said a female representative surnamed Lin (林), who has worked as a customer service clerk for more than six years.
Even if Chunghwa Telecom checked every contract drawn up by the agencies providing temporary staff, to make sure the contents fully abide by the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), the company still could not control the benefits available to its temporary workers, Sheih said.
The Council of Labor Affairs has conducted three inspections of local companies using temporary workers over the past three years, but the situation at Chunghwa Telecom is an indication that the council needs to come up with more effective measures to protect temporary workers, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Pan Men-an (潘孟安) said yesterday.
Pan and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) both urged the council to draw up an amendment to the Labor Standards Act that protects the rights of temporary workers.
“Although some business groups are opposed to the amendment, it is necessary for the council to discuss it with them and add it to the law as soon as possible,” Lo said.
In response, Jerry Liu (劉傳名), director of the council’s Department of Labor Relations, said the council would proceed with the amendment as soon as possible to prohibit agencies from exploiting temporary workers’ rights.
“The council will also hold a fourth inspection at Chunghwa Telecom in August or September,” Liu said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to