The number of workers on unpaid leave has dropped by 26.7 percent to slightly more than 3,400 over the past two weeks, the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) said yesterday.
As of the middle of this month, 36 companies had reached agreements with their employers on unpaid leave, with 3,433 workers on furlough, the latest statistics from the council showed.
The figure represented a decrease from the end of last month, when 4,682 employees from 39 companies had agreed to take unpaid leave and 3,960 of them were on furlough.
This month’s figures showed a more than 50 percent drop in the number of furloughed workers since the end of February.
Official figures on furloughed workers are released on the first and 16th of every month.
Meanwhile, the council said that as of the middle of this month, 1,485 workers from 19 companies had signed up for a program to retrain furloughed workers. Those workers will receive NT$100 an hour for each hour spent in the training program.
The program, which was launched in October last year, provides training subsidies for employees whose work hours have fallen by 16 hours or more over a two week period.
To qualify for the subsidies, one of the conditions is that the companies are required to keep their workforce numbers at a certain agreed level.
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],”
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
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