The Mexican government has formed an alliance of produce industry groups that would work on enforcing wage laws and improving housing, schools and healthcare for laborers at export farms following a newspaper’s investigation of abuses at businesses supplying major US supermarket chains.
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart Stores Inc separately announced that it was reminding its in-house buyers to purchase produce only from farms that meet its standards of decent treatment of workers, the Los Angeles Times reported on Friday.
The actions follow a Times investigative series called Product of Mexico that was published in December last year. The Times reported that many Mexican farmworkers were stuck in squalid labor camps, often without reliable water supplies or adequate food. Some bosses were illegally withholding workers’ wages so they would not leave before the harvest concluded.
The Mexican government action affecting more than 1 million laborers was announced by Mexican Secretary of Agriculture Enrique Martinez y Martinez on Wednesday at an event attended by representatives of nine trade groups, the Times said. Martinez y Martinez said the alliance is important for the agriculture industry and the country.
The group being formed would represent growers and distributors handling 90 percent of Mexico’s produce exports to the US, which are valued at more than US$7.5 billion annually. There were few details of how the goals would be achieved and no commitment to establishing uniform worker-welfare standards, the Times said.
Wal-Mart said the involvement of high-level government officials was vital. The company said senior executives would be sent to meetings with growers involved and would study ways to partner with other groups to improve conditions.
“This effort is aimed at leveraging the work of a broader coalition to improve the lives of workers,” Wal-Mart said.
The separate Wal-Mart initiative also involves asking suppliers to certify that they have visited “any new facility they plan to use for Wal-Mart production” and that the facilities meet company standards.
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