Word: labor
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...largest factory closures in China's battered low-end industries: toy manufacturers, textile companies and shoemakers most prominent among them. China's steadily appreciating renminbi (RMB) currency - which makes Chinese goods more expensive in key export markets like the U.S. - as well as higher costs embedded in a new labor law enacted last year were already wreaking havoc with companies that survived even in the best of times on the thinnest of profit margins. Now, with a global recession gathering pace, the best of times are gone, and the pain in what had been booming areas in southern China...
...rough estimate, this was the eighth time in four weeks that taxi drivers around the nation had slammed on their brakes, making the rolling strikes the longest sustained chain reaction of labor unrest in the history of the People's Republic. The strikes are emerging as a test case of a new policy of information control and management instituted by President Hu Jintao that shuns the authorities' traditional emphasis on suppressing bad news altogether and stresses instead using official media to attempt to control how events like strikes, protests and even natural disasters are reported in China. The complex methods...
...only $16.9 billion in ready cash reserves in place as of Sept. 30. Buried in the same voluminous report is a note indicating that GM has tucked away another $13.5 billion, in trust, to pay for health care for current and future blue-collar retirees covered by labor contracts with the United Auto Workers...
...chairman and CEO Richard Wagoner. Ford's health-care expenses for both active and retired employees now run $2.2 billion, a figure that will drop significantly thanks to the solution provided by the trusts. Once the retiree-health-care liabilities are removed from company balance sheets, the gap in labor costs between Detroit and its nonunion competitors in the South should drop to $250 per vehicle or even less, according to one estimate by the Center for Automotive Research. (Read "Don't Call It Bankruptcy...
...problems China now faces are a result of economic policies that are finally kicking in at an inopportune time. Concerned earlier this year about spiking inflation and a blistering yearly growth rate of 11% or more, China's economic czars set out to cool things down. They introduced tough labor laws designed to decelerate production of lower-value-added goods. It's in that sector that hundreds of thousands of workers are now losing jobs. The same holds true for the bubbling property market, where Chinese authorities conveyed to potential home buyers that they would be wise to hold...