Taiwanese footwear manufacturer Pou Chen Group (寶成集團) yesterday said that the company has decided to cancel a new raft of reward-and-punishment measures for Vietnamese workers at a production base in Dong Nai Province, amid an ongoing strike.
The company is one of the largest contract footwear manufacturers in the world, with clients such as Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Asics, Under Armour, New Balance, Puma, Converse, Salomon and Timberland.
Pou Chen said the strike is not expected to have any material impact on its production.
The company said it has also agreed to provide wages during the strike period, hoping workers would return to the production line today.
The strike started at a plant in Bien Hoa City, the capital of Dong Nai Province in southern Vietnam, on Thursday afternoon.
Foreign media outlets reported that about 17,000 employees out of about 21,600 workers at the plant went on strike over new company policies that cut their salaries for missing work.
Missing work with permission could also result in a loss of monetary rewards, according to reports in Vietnamese media outlets.
Pou Chen said it has been trying to deal with the issue by improving communications with the workers on strike and hoped to resolve the incident as soon as possible.
It was not the first time that the company faced a strike in Vietnam.
In March last year, thousands of workers went on strike at four factories employing more than 90,000 people over the Vietnamese government’s new pension rules.
Pou Chen set up production facilities for its footwear business in Dong Nai in 1994 and operates other production bases in Ho Chi Minh City, Tay Ninh and Tien Giang. The group employs about 160,000 workers in Vietnam.
Vietnam is just one of Pou Chen’s many production sites around the world. It also operates factories in Taiwan, China, Indonesia, the US, Mexico and other areas in Asia.
Pou Chen produces more than 300 million pairs of shoes per year, according to the company’s Web site. The group accounts for about 20 percent of the entire wholesale value of the global branded athletic and casual footwear market.
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
TALENT FACTOR: The nation’s chip sector would be difficult to replace, but to maintain that advantage, Taiwan must retain skilled workers, an academic said A group of experts on Sunday called on Taiwan to strive to maintain its world-leading position in the semiconductor industry, with a US-China chip dispute expected to continue regardless of who becomes the next US president. Tamkang University Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies director Li Da-jung (李大中) said at a Taipei seminar on global semiconductor security that the relationship between the two superpowers would remain confrontational. There appears to be “no turning back” in US-China relations, as US presidential candidates US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump are both expected to continue Washington’s hawkish stance
RSS