India’s federal labour minister asked the southern state of Tamil Nadu to resolve a weeks-long strike by workers at Samsung Electronics, a government source said on Wednesday.
TakeAway Points:
- India’s federal labour minister requested that the southern state of Tamil Nadu settle a weeks-long strike by employees of Samsung Electronics.
- Around 1,000 of the 1,800 workers at the South Korean group’s facility near Chennai have participated in the largest rallies in India in recent memory, calling for union registration and increased pay.
- According to the fixed income technology company behind the proposal, Google Cloud, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and Swiss bank UBS have teamed up to support a bid to manage Britain’s real-time record of bond market transactions.
Tamil Nadu government tasked to end strike
The protests – the biggest such in India in recent years – at the South Korean group’s plant near Chennai have disrupted operations, with over 1,000 of the 1,800 workers demanding higher wages and union recognition.
In a letter addressed to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, labour minister Mansukh Mandaviya has urged the state government to intervene for an “early and amicable” resolution, the source, who did not want to be named as the document has not been made public, said.
The labour unrest, which began on Sept. 9, is an overhang on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s mission to attract foreign investment for manufacturing in the country and to triple electronics production to $500 billion in six years.
The Tamil Nadu plant accounts for about a third of Samsung’s $12 billion annual revenue in India.
The South Korean company has defended its wages, saying its workers at the Tamil Nadu plant are paid almost twice as much as employees in nearby plants belonging to other companies.
Its India HR team has also written an email to some striking workers, warning them of pay being withheld for days they don’t work.
Google and Norway’s wealth fund support UK real-time bond tape bid
Google Cloud, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and Swiss bank UBS have teamed up to support a bid to manage the United Kingdom’s real-time bond market transaction record.
British regulators last year unveiled proposals to build a “consolidated tape” that would collate market data across stock and bond markets, with a bond data feed launching first, to help investors spot the best deals and boost the appeal of UK capital markets.
Long a feature of Wall Street, the European Union has approved a law requiring trading platforms hand over price data for bonds and stocks, for a fee, to an operator.
Bond trading is fragmented across multiple venues and often done bilaterally rather than via an exchange, limiting price transparency and arming some players with more information than others.
Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority said last month it expected to begin a tender to choose a firm to run a bond tape by end-2024, and the industry expects one to be running by late 2026.
London-based Ediphy, a technology provider for fixed income markets, said in a statement on Wednesday it was launching fairCT alongside several firms, also including Cboe Global Markets, FactSet and TP ICAP, to be the UK tape operator.
After previous regulatory efforts to build one fizzled, “we are starting to get much more confidence that a [tape] is viable”, said Chris Murphy, CEO of Ediphy and UBS’ former head of Global FX, Rates and Credit business.
Ediphy decided to partner with players across the industry, including Alphabet unit Google’s cloud subsidiary, where data could be stored, Murphy said.
“We need to make sure we are not optimising something for a vested interest in the market,” he added.
He declined to say whether any of the firms had a financial stake in the initiative.
Regulators and investors generally support the concept of a tape but exchanges have opposed one in order to guard their lucrative data, while banks and asset managers say that without their trades there would be no data.
Murphy said British regulators, to avoid the bond tape becoming “a flop”, needed to ensure it was affordable and that some participants did not delay submitting their data.
“It’s about trying to make sure they get the right balance between carrot and stick,” he said.
