Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) workers yesterday protested over chronic labor disputes, called for increased pay and expressed opposition to a restructuring plan.
Workers yesterday protested in front of Chunghwa Telecom’s headquarters in Taipei’s Zhongzheng District (中正), saying that among the key issues was the company’s inaction on a call for a pay increase of NT$5,000 per month, or about 8 percent, amid rising inflation.
The union’s salary raise proposal was not even on the agenda of the company’s extraordinary board meeting yesterday, protest leaders said.
Photo: CNA
Workers said that they are being unfairly treated with stagnant salaries, despite the telecom posting a strong profit last year.
“The company failed to positively respond to the union’s requests during the negotiations, which aimed to settle differences over labor interests and working conditions,” Chunghwa Telecom Workers’ Union chairman Horng Show-long (洪秀龍) told reporters on the sidelines of the protest.
“Our salaries are lower than our expectations and we now are forced to stand up to safeguard our interests and labor rights,” Horng said.
Chunghwa Telecom has a workforce of about 22,000 people, with their monthly salary averaging about NT$60,000.
All of its employees are part of the union.
The union also demanded that any restructuring and transformation plan the company has be fully discussed before it is implemented.
Chunghwa Telecom said it is willing to communicate with the union over pay raises and labor disputes.
It also plans to overhaul its organization and aims to resolve its differences with employees, the company said in a statement.
The union said that it has not set a timetable for a strike, as it hopes the disputes can be solved through negotiation.
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
At a red-brick factory in the German port city of Hamburg, cocoa bean shells go in one end and out the other comes an amazing black powder with the potential to counter climate change. The substance, dubbed biochar, is produced by heating the cocoa husks in an oxygen-free room to 600°C. The process locks in greenhouse gases and the final product can be used as a fertilizer, or as an ingredient in the production of “green” concrete. While the biochar industry is still in its infancy, the technology offers a novel way to remove carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere, experts have said. Biochar could
RSS