The US government on Friday rejected a union bid to sanction China over its labor standards, but said it was well aware of serious abuses in the country's booming factories.
The office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) said the petition filed by the AFL-CIO, the umbrella US labor federation, for a "Section 301" investigation into Chinese workers' rights was inappropriate.
Had the petition been upheld, it would have triggered a lengthy probe that could have resulted in US trade sanctions against China.
"As we explained in April 2004 when we rejected a similar Section 301 petition on China's labor practices, we do not need to conduct a year-long investigation to know that there are serious concerns with labor rights and working conditions in China," USTR spokesman Sean Spicer said.
The US government will continue to press China to improve workers' rights in its factories and workplaces, he said.
"A Section 301 investigation will neither shed more light on this problem nor lead to a more effective approach for addressing Chinese workers' rights and labor conditions," Spicer said.
China has drawn fierce criticism for its industrial safety record as employers chase profits over all else to stoke the country's startling economic boom. The only union allowed is a federation affiliated to the Communist Party.
The AFL-CIO, which is also aghast at the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs to China in recent years, called the USTR decision a "slap in the face" to both Chinese and American workers.
"In rejecting this petition, [US] President George W. Bush has shown once again that he is beholden to corporate interests at the expense of working families," AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka said in a statement.
"It's a travesty that after five years of failed trade policy that have contributed to the loss of almost three million US manufacturing jobs and a record trade deficit of US$726 billion, the administration continues to take no meaningful action to support America's workers or stop the abuse of workers in China," Trumka said.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS