Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) said it will meet a July deadline for giving Chinese workers greater representation in unions after Apple Inc’s membership of the Fair Labor Association (FLA) last year triggered reforms.
“Anyone can run to be a representative in the labor union,” Louis Woo (胡國輝), spokesman for Taipei-based Foxconn said yesterday by telephone.
The company’s expansion of worker representation started late last year and has to be in compliance with China’s labor union laws.
Foxconn, the world’s largest manufacturer of electronics, submitted to FLA audits of some campuses after Apple joined the labor-monitoring group following worker suicides and an explosion at another supplier that soiled public perceptions of the iPhone maker.
Checks by the Washington-based FLA last year found at least 50 breaches of Chinese regulations and the code of conduct Apple signed when it joined the association.
The FLA also said that worker committees “may not be truly representative” because management nominates candidates for election. Foxconn agreed to ensure that elections would take place without interference, the group said.
Foxconn more than doubled wages after protests from rights groups, including China Labor Watch and Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior.
A follow-up report by the FLA in August last year said Foxconn was on track to meet its July deadline for free elections and cutting workers’ hours to 49 hours a week.
Foxconn began rolling out the new union electoral process, with more union representatives directly elected by workers, last year, Woo said. The company must wait for current terms to expire before implementing the new procedures, he said.
Any union must be a member of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which may choose to conduct collective bargaining instead of allowing Foxconn workers’ representatives to deal with management, said Geoff Crothall, spokesman for Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin.
That may mean Foxconn workers do not get to engage in real collective bargaining because the ACFTU often balances the needs of companies and the government with those of workers, he said.
To make the new process meaningful, Foxconn needs to ensure the elected union representatives are workers, not managers, and are treated as equals by the company, Crothall said.
Those representatives also need to be held accountable by their co- workers, he said.
“Foxconn deserves plaudits for this initial step, but it’s just an initial step,” Crothall said. “It’s going to be a completely new experience for them because they’ve been used to telling workers what they’ll get.”
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS