Leaders of a South Korean union representing tens of thousands of workers at Samsung Electronics staged a protest Thursday outside the house of the company’s chairman and heir, after fresh negotiations failed.

Thousands of union members stopped working on July 8 for what was initially meant to be a three-day strike, part of a long-running battle over pay and benefits. The union subsequently extended the work stoppage “indefinitely”.

It is unclear exactly how many workers have downed tools, and Samsung has said the action is not affecting production, posting record growth and profits earlier this week for the second quarter.

“If a delay occurs in semiconductor processing, the effects won’t be immediate. It takes weeks or months,” Lee Hyun-kuk, vice president of the National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), told AFP.

The union engaged in eleventh-hour talks with management for three days, until Wednesday, but has failed to reach an agreement.

Union executives gathered on Thursday outside Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong’s house, holding pickets that read “Samsung Electronics’ strike, Lee Jae-yong should be accountable”.

Another displayed a picture of Lee holding a finger to his mouth with the caption, “Shh! Labor union, what’s that? Samsung strike, what’s that?”

A handful of police were deployed at the premises and the protest was interrupted by the police warning the union they were not allowed to chant.

“In the 25 days since the strike began, all Lee has done is attend the wedding of the son of Asia’s richest man and give out Samsung phones to Olympic athletes that are worth over 30 billion won ($22 million),” union member Kim Jae-won told reporters.

Lee was a guest at the wedding of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son Anant in July.

Last week he attended a banquet co-hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach at the Louvre Museum.

The union claimed that the company was trying to break the strike with illegal means, including creating a “blacklist” of strike participants.

“We will publicize all of this,” Son Woo-mok, head of NSEU, told AFP.

“Labor suppression, unfair labor practices, industrial accidents, the list continues.”

Samsung said Wednesday it was “communicating and discussing to ensure that this labor union strike ends early”, adding there was “no problem with responding to our customer volume”.

The first labor union at Samsung Electronics was formed in the late 2010s.

The National Samsung Electronics Union, which has around 36,000 members, or nearly a quarter of the company’s total workforce, claims labor organizing remains taboo at the company.

Two years ago, the union staged a demonstration in front of Lee’s residence, successfully securing three additional holidays.

In 2020, former Samsung employees faced criticism for their unorthodox protest methods, which included grilling pork belly, drinking soju, and strumming guitars outside Lee’s home.

© 2024 AFP

Meta on Wednesday reported profit of $13.5 billion in the recently ended quarter, beating market expectations and causing its share price to jump.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said revenue in the quarter was $39 billion, about 22 percent higher than the same period a year earlier.

“We had a strong quarter, and Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year,” said Meta founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta shares rose more than six percent to $506.91 in after-market trade that followed the release of the earnings figures.

The impressive profit came even though Meta’s Reality Labs unit, devoted to virtual and augmented reality products, lost $4.5 billion, which was more than analysts expected.

“We are in the fortunate position where the strong results that we’re seeing in our core products and business give us the opportunity to make deep investments for the future,” Zuckerberg said on an earnings call.

“I plan to fully seize that opportunity.”

Meta’s overall costs rose seven percent to $24.22 billion when compared to the same period a year earlier, with the company racing against Microsoft, Google and other tech firms to be a leader in artificial intelligence.

Microsoft saw its shares slip this week on earnings figures showing its crucial cloud computing unit did not grow as strongly as expected.

Shares of Google-parent Alphabet dropped on concerns that ad revenue was slowing while costs were on the rise after its earnings release.

“Meta stands out from other tech firms that have AI ambitions because it already brings in a massive amount of revenue from digital advertising,” said Sonata Insights founder and chief analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

“Unlike Google, which is grappling with making changes that will impact its core ad business, most of Meta’s AI investments are either aimed at making advertising on its properties work better, or at building new features that could eventually become revenue drivers.”

AI for all

Zuckerberg has become an unexpected evangelist for open-source technology when it comes to developing artificial intelligence, pitting him against OpenAI and Google.

He recently laid out his vision in an open letter titled “Open Source AI is the Path Forward.”

“AI is going to end up affecting almost every product that we have in some way,” Zuckerberg said.

“It’s why there are the jokes about how all the tech CEOs get on these earnings calls and just talk about AI the whole time—it’s because it’s actually super exciting.”

Meta reported that an average of 3.27 billion people used at least one of its family of apps, which includes WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

“I’m particularly pleased with the progress that we’re making with young adults on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said.

“Another bright spot is Threads, which is about to hit 200 million monthly (active users).”

In another potential boost to its business, Meta could also start selling advertising on Threads, its spin on rival social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

Meta said ad views in the quarter were 10 percent more than during the same period last year, and the average price of ads was up a similar percentage.

“Any apprehensions investors may have had about Meta’s spending on AI and the ‘Metaverse’ are likely to be allayed by this quarter’s results,” said eMarketer principal analyst Max Willens.

“Meta’s careful introduction of ads on Reels has led to a perfect storm of rising impressions and rising ad prices.”

Reels is an algorithm-fueled short-video-sharing service Meta launched in a challenge to TikTok, which faces the potential of being banned in the United States under a new law poised to take effect.

The rise in sales and profit continued Meta’s rebound of 2023, which came thanks to drastic cost-cutting, including massive layoffs in what Zuckerberg dubbed the “year of efficiency,” which saw tens of thousands of employees let go after a miserable 2022.

Meta said its global workforce now stood at 70,799, down from a peak of more than 87,000 employees in 2022.

© 2024 AFP

Hollywood’s video game performers are heading to the Warner Bros. Studios lot Thursday to picket against what they call an unwillingness from top gaming companies to protect voice actors and motion capture workers equally against the unregulated use of artificial intelligence.

The protest marks the first large labor action since game voice actors and performance workers voted to strike last week. The work stoppage came after more than 18 months of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement stalled over protections around the use of AI.

Union leaders have billed AI as an existential crisis for performers. Game voice actors and motion capture artists’ likenesses, they say, could be replicated by AI and used without consent and fair compensation. The unregulated use of AI, the union says, poses “an equal or even greater threat” to performers in the video game industry than it does in film and television because the capacity to cheaply and easily create convincing digital replicas of performers’ voices is widely available.

Audrey Cooling, a spokesperson for the video game producers, said the companies have offered AI protections as well as “a significant increase in wages for SAG-AFTRA represented performers in video games.”

“We have worked hard to deliver proposals with reasonable terms that protect the rights of performers while ensuring we can continue to use the most advanced technology to create a great gaming experience for fans,” Cooling said. “We have proposed terms that provide consent and fair compensation for anyone employed under the (contract) if an AI reproduction or digital replica of their performance is used in games.”

SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee argued that the studios’ definition of who constitutes a “performer” is key to understanding the issue of who would be protected.

“The industry has told us point blank that they do not necessarily consider everyone who is rendering movement performance to be a performer that is covered by the collective bargaining agreement,” SAG-AFTRA Chief Contracts Officer Ray Rodriguez said at a news conference last week, adding that some physical performances are being treated as “data.”

The union had been negotiating with an industry bargaining group consisting of signatory video game companies. Those companies are Activision Productions Inc., Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices Inc., Electronic Arts Productions Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Llama Productions LLC, Take 2 Productions Inc., VoiceWorks Productions Inc. and WB Games Inc.

The global video game industry generated nearly $184 billion in revenue in 2023, according to game market forecaster Newzoo, with revenues projected to reach $207 billion in 2026.

“We are at the table because we want to include SAG-AFTRA-represented performers in our productions, and we will continue working to resolve the last remaining issue in these negotiations,” Cooling said. “Our goal is to reach an agreement with the union that will end this strike.”

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

When do you think you’ll retire? Aged 65? Younger, if you’re lucky? Maybe older if you’re unlucky—or if you’re young right now?

Someone from a high-income country starting their first job can expect to retire on average two years later than today’s pensioners. And in some countries the retirement age will be much higher. Denmark is planning on raising its pension age to 74 by 2070.

Yet despite all the changes over the last 70 years in society, job markets, educational systems and retirement policies and trends, the working age as defined by the wealthy countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is still 15 to 64.

Having a defined working age helps individuals planning their retirement as well as governments making spending plans. But it’s puzzling that this age bracket remains the standard measure.

After all, a large number of people outside this age range continue to contribute to the economy in both formal and informal ways. Even with today’s pension ages, in OECD countries an average of 23% of people aged 65–69 are still working.

This highlights why focusing solely on chronological age when talking about working life is a problem. As the pension age rises, the working age concept as we know it today will become increasingly irrelevant. Societies need a more innovative and dynamic approach.

One alternative used in some countries is the idea of a functional age, a measure of certain physical and mental capabilities. But this is only applied to a handful of jobs such as pilots, firefighters and police—where specific abilities like eyesight, fitness, brain age and decision-making—are emphasized.

Making functional age the mainstream measure isn’t necessarily the way forward, but it does show that alternative thinking is possible.

My research shows that other metrics such as people’s cognitive age, biological age, functional age and social age (self-perceptions of age and social norms of age-appropriate behavior) also impact on their abilities to work, earn and pay. These do not always match up with a person’s chronological age.

Additionally, “typical” working-age people may not be able to earn for several reasons, including disabilities and caring responsibilities. And different groups, for example migrants, often have distinct motivations, interests and opportunities for wage work participation.

Setting most societal and economic parameters by age alone comes with explicit social and economic costs and in many ways exacerbates ageist attitudes in societies and workplaces.

For instance, older people can often be perceived as frail and less productive, while receiving more (for instance, pensions and benefits). At work, too, older people are more susceptible to redundancies and face recruitment biases. Also, employers often presume they are hard to train.

Put simply, current economic and social systems reinforce the idea that chronological age is the best measure of older people’s usefulness in society and for the economy.

The arbitrary nature of the system has ageism embedded within it. This prejudice is unlikely to change until the perception of older people as economic and social burdens is challenged.

Time for a change?

The notion of working age probably emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a period marked by the industrial revolution and the development of modern labor economics. As societies transitioned from agrarian to industrial economies, understanding the age structure of the workforce became crucial for effective economic planning.

Legislative milestones, for instance, the UK’s Factory Act of 1833 and the Education Act 1918, which restricted children’s working hours and raised the school leaving age from 12 to 14 respectively, reflect the establishment of a formal working-age structure. These were aimed at eradicating child labor exploitation and improving workers’ conditions (although exceptions still exist, for example, for child artists).

While the lower limit is closely tied to issues surrounding child labor, the upper limit is based on global data indicating that the majority of people usually remain in paid work until around 64 or 65. After this, participation rates start to decline sharply.

This age range serves as a benchmark for designing employment policies, welfare systems, health services, and economic projections and analysis. Major world organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Labor Organization (ILO), also use this classification, allowing for consistency in data collection and reporting across countries and over time.

A crucial metric derived from this is the old-age dependency ratios (OADR), which measure the number of dependants compared to the working-age population. This helps gauge the economic burden on the productive part of the population, indicating how many people within this age range are working and paying taxes to sustain services and infrastructure.

A skewed population, with too many old or too many young people outside this defined age bracket, can strain national wealth and resources, as fewer people are available to work and pay for running public services and benefit systems.

But the current rigid structure pits old against young to create an artificial divide. This often leads to generational tensions and competition for resources. Even if the upper age limit is adjusted to match with the state pension age, it will remain arbitrary, given the ever-expanding longevity trends of human populations.

Another possible system may be the active dependency ratio (ADR), where the economically inactive to economically active ratio is used. But this is not considered a rounded measure either, since several socio-cultural factors influence people’s economic independence.

There is no doubt that changes to the current structure will be complex and time-consuming, requiring layers of revisions and restructuring of systems.

But a step in the right direction would be to phase out structures based on chronological age. A holistic shift, uncoupling age from economic measures, will prompt societies to reconsider their views on the value of chronological age as a measure and help eliminate the artificial age divide.

Using age as a social and economic identity is anything but consistent. In the age of fluid identities, it’s time to re-evaluate the relationships between age, society and economy. Societies need a dynamic, age-fluid approach that will recognize the value of both economic and non-economic needs and contributions.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.