Unions and labor rights activists yesterday staged a protest outside the Shanghai Commercial & Savings Bank (SCSB, 上海商業儲蓄銀行) headquarters in Taipei, accusing the bank of repressing union members, and urging it to allow a fired former union member to return to work.
Members from several bank unions and the Taiwan Labor Front (TLF) yesterday also voiced their support for former senior SCSB employee and union leader Cheng Chun-chih (陳軍智), who was twice dismissed by the bank.
Their protest came in following several readjustments in the bank’s position on labor disputes, which the Taipei City Department of Labor confirmed as employment discrimination and the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) confirmed as repression of union activities.
“Since the founding of the SCSB Union in 2010, the company’s management has repeatedly harassed union members — including Chen — through one-on-one talks with union members and job readjustments,” TLF representative Chang Feng-yi (張烽益) said during the protest.
The Taipei City Department of Labor previously imposed a fine of NT$1 million (US$33,800) on the bank for its discriminatory actions regarding Chen and other union members.
However, the bank still fired Chen last year and would not let him return to work despite a CLA ruling that confirmed the bank’s moves as repression of union activities.
“The ban is simply ruthless,” Chen said.
“One of the problems with labor laws is that the most severe penalty a company that represses union activities can get is a fine, but they don’t care about these fines, and sometimes even pay the fine from the budget that has been designated to be used for employee welfare,” he added.
In a written statement, SCSB denied that Chen was fired as a result of his union activities., adding that was he dismissed because of excessive absence from work.
As to Chen’s request to return to work, the bank said that his case is now being reviewed by the court, and the bank will decide whether to allow him to return to work based on the court ruling.
NXP Semiconductors NV expects its first automotive-grade 5-nanometer chip built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to become available for automakers within one-and-a-half years at the earliest, following demand for better computing performance and energy efficiency for connected vehicles, a company executive said yesterday. That would mean a significant upgrade from the 16-nanometer technology NXP adopted in its existing series of microprocessors. NXP chief technology executive Lars Reger made the remarks during a media briefing yesterday in Taipei. The latest updates came after NXP unveiled its plan to source 5-nanometer capacity from TSMC in 2021. This is Reger’s first trip to
AI TREND: TSMC has been rapidly expanding capacity to meet a spike in demand for advanced packaging services, but still expects supplies to be tight for 18 months Arizona is in talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) about advanced chip packaging, state Governor Katie Hobbs said yesterday, which is crucial for the manufacturing of artificial intelligence (AI) chips. TSMC, which is building a US$40 billion chip factory in the US state, has not announced plans to build facilities for advanced chip packaging in the US. Advanced packaging processes stitch multiple chips together into a single device, lowering the added cost of more powerful computing. “Part of our efforts at building the semiconductor ecosystem is focusing on advanced packaging, so we have several things in the works around that
The European Commission’s digital chief yesterday said that murky Chinese laws were fueling concerns among foreign firms in the country, following discussions with Beijing officials about critical areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data governance. Vera Jourova, who is also the commission’s vice president, made the comments after meeting on Monday with Chinese counterparts including Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing (張國清) in the second “High-level Digital Dialogue” between the two sides. Among the concerns Jourova said she had heard about from European businesses in China was the “unpredictability of the decisions and interpretation of the laws by the regulators.” Beijing has recently implemented
EVADING US CONTROLS? ‘These surveillance chips are relatively easy to manufacture compared to smartphone processors,’ a source said about HiSilicon’s components A Huawei Technologies Co (華為) unit is shipping new Chinese-made chips for surveillance cameras in a fresh sign that the Chinese tech giant is finding ways around four years of US export controls, two sources briefed on the unit’s efforts said. The shipments to surveillance camera manufacturers from the company’s chip design unit, HiSilicon Technologies Co (海思半導體), started this year, said one of the sources and a third source familiar with the industry supply chain. One of the sources briefed on the unit said that at least some of the customers were Chinese. Huawei unveiled new smartphones in the past few weeks that
RSS