Foxconn says underage workers in China plant set up

10:00 AM China, Foxconn, plant, underage, workers No Comments

Taipei - Foxconn technology group, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, has admitted setting of young people at the age of 14 in a Chinese factory, breach of national law, in a case that internally raises further questions about his student program.

Labour human rights aktivisten in China have accused, Foxconn and other large employers in China student internship as a cheap source of labour for production lines where it is more difficult, reduce young adult workers to paid jobs to win.

Foxconn, the trade name of Taiwan's Hon Hai precision industry, said that it had found that some interns at a plant in Yantai, in the northeast of the province of Shandong work under the age of 16 were legal. He did not say, how many were minors.

"Our investigation has shown that the interns in question, who ranged in age from 14 to 16 in this campus for about three weeks had worked," it was said in a statement on Tuesday.

"This is not only a violation of China's labour law, it is also a violation of policy and immediately measures were taken against Foxconn, again to the trainees their educational institutions concerned."

China's official Xinhua News Agency, citing an unnamed government official of the Yantai said that 56 of the underage interns to their schools would be brought back.

The students had used, after Foxconn of development zone asked, where the factory is located last month solve a defect if they were needed, to a deficit of 19,000 employees make Xinhua added to help.

Apple's largest manufacturer
Foxconn is Apple Inc of's largest production partner and makes products for Dell Inc., Sony Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co among its other clients. It said that non-Apple products make the Yantai plant.

Foxconn has the announcement after reviewing Chinese media reports of underage interns under its China workforce of 1.2 million. He said that it had found no evidence of similar injuries at any of its other plants in China.

Foxconn said that with the local government schools participated it the case of Yantai in the intern program, as far as compatible with labour market policy and his lawyer would work.

"But we recognize that the full responsibility for these violations mounting platform with our company, and we have apologized to each student for our role in this action," said the company.

Foxconn and Apple were forced that improving working conditions in Chinese factories, the world's iPads optimally and iPhones after a series of published suicides in the year 2010 and reports of labour abuses, such as excessive overtime, threw a spotlight on the conditions in the plants.

Last month, a riot at a Foxconn plant broke the in place dormitory for migrant workers, the Assembly of iPhones in the city of Taiyuan, about living conditions inside Foxconn.

Foxconn plans to reduce in response to the control of the current 20 overtime less than nine hours a week.

He defended his intern program on Tuesday, say that they made only 2.7 percent of its workforce in China. Internships could be long-term or short-term, carried out in cooperation with schools and other educational institutions.

The average internship about three and-a-half months lasted, it was said.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

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NYT: Sources say Airbus planning first US plant

2:30 PM Airbus, first, planning, plant, sources No Comments

Airbus, the European plane maker, plans to build its first assembly line in the United States in Mobile, Ala., in an aggressive foray into the world’s largest market for single-aisle airplanes, people with knowledge of the plan said on Wednesday.

The plan calls for an investment of several hundred million dollars in a plant on Boeing’s home turf that could eventually assemble dozens of Airbus’s popular 150-seat A320 jets each year. Details are expected to be announced as early as Monday, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan was still confidential.

In taking the plunge into the United States, Airbus is betting that American airlines, many of which have large fleets of aging jets, will be enticed to consider an A320 that was “made in America” over Boeing’s competing 737. By assembling the planes with nonunion American workers, and in using dollars, Airbus also stands to reduce production costs.

Globally, Airbus and Boeing split the market for single-aisle planes fairly evenly. But in the United States, Airbus holds a 20 percent share.

North America is the biggest market for single-aisle planes. Airbus has forecast that nearly 70 percent of new jet sales worldwide over the next 20 years — 19,200 aircraft worth $1.4 trillion by 2030 — will be of this type. Forty percent of those planes are expected to replace aging, less fuel-efficient aircraft.

“If this is confirmed, it is nothing short of a tectonic shift in the dynamics of the North American aerospace market, with strong ramifications for both commercial and defense,” said Michel Merluzeau, a managing partner at G2 Solutions, an aerospace consultancy in Kirkland, Wash.

“That Airbus is considering doing this suggests that they view investment in Alabama as a necessary tool to maintain their competitiveness in North America,” he said.

But the move to open an American factory could raise eyebrows in European capitals and among labor unions — particularly in France, where the new Socialist government of President Francois Hollande has said it will seek to punish companies that move jobs overseas with tax penalties and with the withdrawal of certain state subsidies. Airbus opened its first non-European assembly line in China four years ago.

Stefan Schaffrath, a spokesman for Airbus in Toulouse, France, said Wednesday that the company had “nothing to announce at this point.”

But Fabrice Bregier, the chief executive of Airbus, was quoted in a Spanish newspaper interview published on Wednesday as saying that an American assembly line was “part of a stream of ideas in our international development.”

“We are studying what we have to do to be close to our customers,” Mr. Bregier told the newspaper, El Economista.

It was not immediately clear when Airbus expected the plant to open or how many planes it would initially produce. Its plant in Tianjin, China, assembles three planes a month, 8 percent of Airbus’s global output of single-aisle planes.

Mr. Merluzeau estimated that it would be three to four years before a Mobile plant would be ready to begin operations.

An agreement to build an assembly line in Mobile would be the culmination of a seven-year on-again, off-again courtship between Alabama officials and Airbus’s parent company, European Aeronautic Defense and Space.

As long ago as 2005, EADS, which already has an engineering site in Mobile, proposed building a $600 million assembly line for its larger A330 aircraft as part of a bid for a $35 billion United States Air Force contract for aerial fueling tankers that was awarded to Boeing last year.

An earlier move into the United States yielded significant payoffs for the company. The American market share of EADS’s helicopter division, Eurocopter, doubled to around 50 percent after the company opened an assembly line in 2004 in Columbus, Miss., for its UH-72 Lakota and A-Star choppers.

European governments are likely to be wary of such a move by a company considered one of Europe’s industrial jewels. But according to one person with knowledge of the plan, the governments are likely to be persuaded that it could eventually create as many as 10 jobs in Europe — not only at Airbus, but also in its supplier network — for every one job created in Alabama.

This story, "Airbus Is Said to Plan A Factory in Alabama," originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright © 2012 The New York Times

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UN report highlights Japan nuclear power plant error

5:10 PM error, highlights, Japan, nuclear, plant, power, Report No Comments

TOKYO Japan underestimated the risk of tsunamis and required monitor public health and safety of workers to closely following the crisis on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power a team of international safety inspectors of the world's largest nuclear disaster said in a preliminary examination since Chernobyl.

The report, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team under the leadership of Britain's top nuclear safety official Mike Weightman, highlighted some of the well documented weaknesses, which on the crisis in Fukushima contributed, if the plant, 150 km north of Tokyo, by a massive earthquake and then a tsunami in quick succession was taken on 11 March.

Those start with an error, a tsunami to plan, that would overrun the 19-foot break wall of Fukushima and knock out back-up electrical generators to four reactors, despite several predictions of an agency and operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s own scientists of the Government, which is such a danger was.

The IAEA team said Japan's crisis lessons for the nuclear industry around the world offered including, that operators regularly the risks of natural disasters should review and, that should "hardened" emergency response center to be established with accidents.

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"The tsunami risk for multiple sites has been underestimated," the report said three page summary. "Nuclear plant designers and operators should evaluate appropriately and provide protection against the risks of all natural hazards."

The report praised the general response to the disaster, however, say that it had been exemplary.

Story: Excessive radiation for two Fukushima employed?

Goshi Hosono, an advisor of Prime Minister Naoto Kan, accepts the report, marking the first step in the effort by the Japanese authorities to show that the lessons from Fukushima can certainly be applied to its remaining nuclear reactors.

Hosono said that the Government would have to review nuclear regulatory framework.

Playbook "not" work
The IAEA team present the results of a Ministerial Conference on nuclear safety in Vienna on June 20-24.

"We had a textbook, but it didn't work," said Tatsujiro Suzuki, a nuclear expert and Vice-Chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission.

The economic stakes are high. Japan is only 19 of his pre-Fukushima tally 54 reactors working.

Unless local officials that Tokyo has a plan to the other resistant against the kind of blackout that plunged Fukushima in meltdown can be persuaded, more plants offline for maintenance will fall.

In the worst case all could Japan's reactors shut down in mid 2012. That would take 30 percent of the country's power generation and increase the risk of deep in the, close to permanent power rationing, officials say.

The Fukushima accident has forced more than 80,000 residents from their homes and deepening workers raised concerns about the safety operation of nearby children, fighting for the reactors and to stabilize the food supply as radiated from the site of water leaks.

In the report, the IAEA team Japan calls follow up monitoring of workers and the public health.

The crisis has also redirected, attention and resources of the reconstruction after the earthquake and tsunami, about 24,000 people in North Japan Coast killed.

'Very stupid'
Experts who have reviewed the Fukushima incident say, the IAEA report is certainly a starting point in the debate about what to be done in a country nuclear plants where the risks of earthquakes must still be understood.

"There are aspects of the planning for the security of the Fukushima plant, which are very stupid, in retrospect, and show a lack of imagination," said Kim Kearfott, a University of Michigan nuclear safety expert who toured their own this week Japan. "The nuclear industry can do better than this."

As the uranium fuel in the reactor No. 1 Kulissenwechsel started heating towards meltdown on 11 March, Tokyo Electric (Tepco) officials at the failures of the most important safety equipment for the loss of the power of the plant.

Measuring empty of Fukushima to officials in Tokyo monitoring the expected radiation hazard related problem. Complicated software to the expected plume of debris model an explosion of Fukushima had set up rather it with exact dates as gross assumptions.

Early on March 12, officials in the Ministry of education and technology had fixed the glitch and submit the projected radiation show Prime Minister kan, but the data was never released to the public.

In the meantime it was dangerously unclear, which was on the ground in Fukushima. TEPCO of President was in China, the utility of President was grounded in the Western Japan on a personal journey. Sakae Muto, the ranking Tepco official, spent the night of the quake with mayors of small towns in the vicinity of Fukushima, you notice of the accident, rather than the command center accession pressed.

The plant chief operating officer of Masao Yoshida, ignored to stop an order injection sea water in the reactor No. 1 due to a user request from kan's Office. Experts say that Yoshida made the right call, but say the confusion which highlighted major problems in the early response to the accident.

"It was impossible, that works as it was set up had the system," said Suzuki, who believes that Japan's nuclear industry must now show it manage and contain the most incredible accident at all its remaining nuclear reactors can public confidence to win. ", If they can demonstrate that it will be very difficult."

Others say that Japan must show, that he at the toughest Council critics, including long delayed steps, make independent of the most politically powerful utility industry to its nuclear regulatory agency acts.

"Japanese atomic operations must be updated on the International Council," said Kearfott. "Much of this advice was ignored in the past."

Reuters and the associated press contributed to this report.

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Gas plant largest floating husband object

7:12 PM floating, husband, largest, object, plant No Comments

PERTH - energy companies Royal Dutch Shell has made a decision to construct what it claims is the world's largest floating husband object: a massive natural gas plant off the Australian coast.

Shell said the plant built, in a South Korean shipyard, are longer than six football fields and from 260,000 tons of steel - five times more than Sydney is famous harbour bridge or about six times as much as the largest aircraft carrier.

The company claimed that the "Prelude" liquefied natural gas plant is 25 years, and Friday resists the worst hurricanes.

Shell did not say how much it will cost to build. It expected that the structure brought online to 2017.

The plant is in the equivalent of 110,000 barrels per day in gas from undersea fields 125 miles off the coast and cool it in liquefied natural gas, LNG called.

"This is a seal of trust in the idea of floating LNG,", said Tony Regan, analyst at Tri-Zen capital in Singapore.

So far, liquefaction of offshore gas pipe-laying took part in the gas to a land-based.

With the consent of the prelude, shell delivers a host of other LNG project developers scrambling to meet fast-growing Asian demand, particularly from China and India.

The devastating tsunami, there are also LNG demand from Japan to March there several nuclear reactors offline and recently Japan's Chubu Electric Power Co. asked to close its two operating nuclear reactors in the Hamaoka plant.

Japan LNG imports has increased after shutdown nuclear capacity in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami in this year.

China imported rocket to 46 million tonnes only about 9 million tonnes LNG in 2010, but the consumption expected to be five times by 2020.

Australia has currently around a 200 billion dollar (213 billion dollars) worth of LNG projects on the drawing board. The industry is to triple current production to 60 million tonnes per year of 2020.

The associated press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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