Police have detained 104 striking workers protesting low wages at a Samsung Electronics Co plant in southern India, as they were planning a march yesterday without permission, officials said.
The detention marks an escalation of a strike by workers at a Samsung home appliance plant near Chennai in the state of Tamil Nadu. Workers want higher wages and have boycotted work for a week, disrupting production that contributes about one-third of Samsung’s annual India revenue of US$12 billion.
The Samsung protests have cast a shadow on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan of courting foreign investors to “Make in India” and tripling electronics production to US$500 billion in six years as foreign companies diversify their supply chain beyond China.
Photo: Reuters
The workers yesterday planned to start a protest march, but were detained as no permission was given since there are schools, colleges and hospitals in that area, Kanchipuram District senior police officer K. Shanmugam said.
“It is the main area which would become totally paralyzed and [the protest would] disturb public peace,” he said. “We have detained them in wedding halls as all of them can’t be in stations.”
Workers have since last week been protesting at a makeshift tent near the plant, demanding higher wages, recognition for a union backed by the influential labor group Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and better working hours.
Samsung is not keen to recognize any union backed by a national labor group, such as the CITU, and talks with workers and state government officials have not yielded any resolution.
The South Korean company is planning job cuts of up to 30 percent of its overseas staff in some divisions, including in India.
India’s antitrust body has found that Samsung and other smartphone companies colluded with e-commerce giants to launch devices exclusively, contravening competition laws, Reuters has reported.
The Samsung plant employs about 1,800 workers and more than 1,000 of them have been on strike.
The factory makes appliances such as refrigerators, TVs and washing machines.
Another Samsung plant that makes smartphones in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh has had no unrest.
CITU leader A. Jenitan said police also detained one of their senior leaders, E. Muthukumar, who was leading the Samsung protests at the factory near Chennai.
“The workers have been asked to return to the [strike] tent,” he said.
Shanmugam said there was no timeline as to how long the workers would be detained.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
RSS