TechPulse USA

There is no way to spin 68 months of pay as an insult — except when your employer just posted a record year and sold out its newest factory before it opened. On Monday, the union at Micron's Taoyuan plant in Taiwan announced what 68 months could not buy: it plans to walk out on Thursday, October 22, demanding a one-off bonus of 83 months' salary plus a permanent slice of 15 per cent of the company's operating profits. The timing is the message. The strike is set for the same day as mediation talks with the much larger Taichung union, turning Thursday into Micron's biggest labour reckoning in Taiwan. Huge global appetite for the chips inside AI data centres has sent revenues soaring for the companies that make them. Now the people who make them want their cut. It is the simplest dispute in the industry — and one of the hardest to settle, because both sides are fighting over a formula, not just a number. Thursday Is Both Deadline and Detonation The Taoyuan union a...

If you have ever wondered what it costs to tell Amazon how to treat its workers, the number is now public: 7,000 jobs, 15 warehouses, one entire city. On October 16, the company put New York on notice — pass the Delivery Protection Act, the labour bill backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Amazon will rip its last-mile network out of the five boroughs rather than directly hire its own delivery drivers. The bill's supporters call that blackmail. Amazon calls it arithmetic. And if you are tempted to call it a bluff, ask Montreal. That last sentence is not rhetoric. It is the closest thing this story has to a precedent, and it is grim: early last year, Amazon shut down seven warehouses near Montreal after a union organised 300 workers at a Laval facility. By March, roughly 1,900 warehouse workers and 2,800 delivery contractors had lost their jobs. The company denies the closures had anything to do with the union. The empty buildings — and the rent Amazon is still paying on them — tell...