Guai Guai's green bags of coconut-flavored snacks are a familiar sight beside servers and semiconductor equipment in Taiwan, where engineers treat them as a good-luck charm. Now the company that makes them faces a labor dispute that could interrupt production.
Tom's Hardware reports, citing the Taipei Times, that 94% of workers at Guai Guai's Zhongli factory voted to authorize a strike. A walkout had not begun at publication time; workers were waiting for the company's response while negotiations continued.
The dispute follows Guai Guai's plan to move production from Zhongli to Hsinchu, about a 45-minute drive south and the center of Taiwan's semiconductor industry. Employees can keep their jobs by moving or commuting, and the company offered a 5% pay increase. The union argues that increase merely tracks Taiwan's newly announced minimum-wage adjustment and does not compensate longtime workers for the disruption.
A factory sale drives the dispute
Advanced Semiconductor Engineering bought the Zhongli property for NT$5.6 billion, about $176.1 million. The union says employees have not been offered a bonus, dividend or other share of that windfall, even though more than one-third of the workforce has been with Guai Guai for at least 30 years.
