Recruiting in China

China's Labor and Social Security Department has issued a reminder in local media to new college graduates that their probation period should be included in labor contracts with employers as part of their employment term and the trial use period must not be more than six months.

Specifically, the Tianjin Municipal labor and Social Security Department has said that the probationary period is for the employer and the employee to mutually understand each other and make a mutual decision. According to relevant laws, a probationary period shall be set between an employer and its employee, but the period should be included in the formal labor contract.

According to China's new Labor Contract Law which is going to take effect on January 1, 2008, the probationary period must not be more than 1 month if the labor contract term is less than one year, and the probation period should not be over two months when the contract period is less than three years. The probation period for a labor contract whose term is more than three years should be less than six months.

In addition, the employer should only set one probation term with the employees, and during the probation period, the employer must offer social insurance for employees.

BRISK exports, strong investment and buoyant consumption will lift China's economic growth to 11.2 percent this year, up from an earlier estimate of 10 percent, with the inflation rate breaking 4 percent, says an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report released in Beijing today.

"The faster than expected growth momentum built up this year is expected to carry into 2008," said Zhuang Jian, senior economist of ADB's China Resident Mission, at a news conference.

The new ADB report also forecasts that China's GDP growth in 2008 will reach 10.8 percent, revising from the 9.8 percent in an ADB report published in March.

Zhuang said China's economy grew at a faster-than-expected 11.5percent in the first half of 2007, which is the highest rate since1994.

According to Zhuang, China's fast economic growth was led by industry, especially in such sectors as steel, electricity, chemicals, and oil processing.

Strong profitability, buoyant sales and still-low lending rates also drove investment during the period.

The ADB report said investment administered by local governments grew by 28.1 percent in the first six months, nearly doubling the equivalent central government rate.

China's inflation barometer - the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is estimated to hit 4.2 percent this year and 3.8 percent in 2008 as against the previous forecasts of 1.8 percent and 2.2 percent respectively, according to the ADB report.

Zhuang said rising global grain prices and a pig disease outbreak led to rocketing food prices, but this is expected to ease next year, paving the way for the implementation of planned reforms in the pricing of state-controlled sectors such as water, power and natural gas.

Significantly higher than expected inflation, however, poses a risk to the outlook. Zhuang said adverse weather would lower domestic grain production at a time when imported grain prices are high.

By KEVIN DUFFY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 09/12/07

Georgia's business ties with the People's Republic of China grew a little stronger Wednesday.

The state and Sany Heavy Industry Co. of Changsha, China, formally announced that the maker of construction equipment will open a plant in Peachtree City and create 200 jobs.

Sany will invest $30 million in land, buildings and equipment. Operations at the 241-acre site are expected to begin in the first quarter of 2009.

Sany is the third Chinese company in 15 months to announce it will do business in Georgia.

Hans Gant, senior vice president for economic development at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, said Sany is the biggest recruitment success so far because in 10 years its work force could grow to 600 and its investment to $100 million.

Sany makes concrete-pumping equipment. Two examples of what it produces, extending 121 feet in the air, were parked in front of the Capitol during the announcement.

Sany Group, the parent company, employs 18,000 people and sells in more than 60 countries. Company Chairman Liang Wengen, who was at the ceremony, is a billionaire, according to Forbes magazine.

"What won the deal is just we wanted the business," Gant said.

Financial incentives played a role. Sany will receive declining property tax abatements over 10 years that will save the company an estimated $2.2 million, according to Matthew Forshee, president and chief executive of the Fayette County Development Authority. During that time, Sany will pay about $2.75 million in property taxes, Forshee said.

In addition, Peachtree City will chip in $50,000 and Fayette County $150,000 to help Sany buy its industrial park site, priced at $6.5 million.

The state Department of Community Affairs will make available a $900,000 Regional Economic Business Assistance grant.

The Georgia Economic Development Department and the metro chamber have been building relationships with Chinese businesses and government officials for several years.

"It hasn't happened by accident," Gov. Sonny Perdue told the audience. "We've been in Asia and China looking for relationships and partnerships."

The state recently began operating a one-person office in Beijing, and it's lobbying China to open a consulate in Atlanta. Delta Air Lines is trying to secure direct flights from Atlanta to Beijing and to Shanghai.

In June 2006, the business recruiting trips began to pay off. Kingwasong, which makes soy sauce, announced it would invest $12 million to $15 million in a new plant in Newnan, creating 200 jobs. In May, a second Chinese business, General Protecht Group, which makes electronic equipment, bought 211 acres in Barnesville to build a plant.

In his translated remarks to the crowd, Liang mentioned Georgia's airports, roads, ports ¡ª even its trees ¡ª as he explained why his company chose the state.

He called it "the outstanding talents in the blessed land."

By now, the perils of securing online data with little more than user names and passwords should be well known. Monster.com learned that lesson late and the hard way, prompting last week's disclosure that the Web jobs board will spend millions of dollars to improve its security.

Monster Worldwide Inc. recently discovered that con artists had grabbed contact information from resumes for 1.3 million people — and likely many more, since Monster now says this was not an isolated incident. Files were pilfered not only from Monster.com but from USAJobs.gov, the federal-government career-listing service operated by Monster.

The stolen information is not by itself ultra-sensitive, since resumes generally do not include Social Security numbers, financial data or account information.

But contact information can be lucrative for online criminals, who used what they got from Monster to craft "phishing" e-mails that go after such sensitive data.

The affair could serve as a warning to other businesses that operate online. But if the past is any guide, many will shrug off this episode.

"You're going to see this happen again and again and again," said security analyst Bruce Schneier, chief technologist for BT Counterpane. "I assure you, every other company didn't say, 'Wow, look what happened to Monster, we have to fix our problem.'"

Blame many factors. For one, upgrading security can be expensive, and many companies are reluctant to shell out for improvements until they've been viscerally reminded of the need for it.

"How do you justify a $10 million security budget when nothing happened last year?" said Mark Rasch, a former federal cybercrime investigator now with FTI Consulting Inc.

Another problem is that companies are hesitant to put up blockades that can annoy legitimate users.

"We're all accustomed to a straightforward and easy experience," said Dennis Maicon, executive vice president of Digital Resolve, a unit of Landmark Communications Inc. that sells automated fraud-detection systems. "We want to do things quick, we don't want to jump through all kinds of hoops to say, 'Hey, it's me,' because a good portion of the time, it is you. A company like Monster has to maintain the customer experience."

That balance can shift, of course, if regulations require more stringent security. Many financial institutions and insurance companies have adopted extra measures like Digital Resolve's authentication technology as a result. It lets customers sign on in a straightforward way but scans for anomalies (the user is signing on from, say, Ukraine all of a sudden) that might indicate an unauthorized person has stolen the password.

After the Monster breach was disclosed by researchers at Symantec Corp., Monster pointed out that its network security had not been broken. No one hacked in, after all. Rather, the criminals obtained legitimate keys to the system — most likely by phishing or guessing passwords belonging to recruiters with access to Monster's tens of millions of resumes.

Yet the chance that someone would co-opt legitimate access to a network should itself have been considered a security flaw.

In one of the most infamous incidents, data-gathering giant ChoicePoint Inc. found in 2004 that criminals had posed as honest-to-goodness customers and filched information on 163,000 people. ChoicePoint ended up spending about $30 million fixing the situation, including $15 million to settle charges from the Federal Trade Commission that its standards were weak.

It's unclear how much of a hit Monster's breach will cause the company, which already has been struggling. A month ago it announced layoffs of 15 percent of its work force. The stock is near 52-week lows and a key finance executive just departed.

To respond, Monster has said it would spend at least $80 million on upgrades to its site, which now include security changes. Among them: closer monitoring of the site and limits on the way its data can be accessed.

Patrick W. Manzo, Monster's vice president for compliance and fraud prevention, said the company had already been exploring several of the steps.

"What this incident has brought sharply into focus is that this is an issue that needs to be addressed immediately and not something that you can look at with a phased approach," Manzo said Friday.

Some of Monster's newer practices may already be in place at rival online job boards. For instance, both CareerBuilder.com, which is owned by newspaper companies and Microsoft Corp., and Yahoo Inc.'s HotJobs say they limit the number of resumes that one user account can access over a given period. (That is of limited effect, however, if fraudsters corrupt multiple accounts, a common pattern.)

CareerBuilder spokeswoman Jenny Sullivan added that her site has software that monitors for excessive or otherwise unusual usage patterns. Last week, CareerBuilder began "scrubbing" Social Security numbers and other sensitive information out of postings left by job seekers, though Sullivan said that step was in the works even before Monster's breach.

The unavoidable truth about computer security, though, is that such steps can slow but not stop online fraud. Gartner Inc. security analyst Avivah Litan advises job-seekers to use a separate e-mail account for career queries and publicly post only basic contact information, nothing more than what could be found in the phone book.

"Assume nothing's safe," she said.

On the Internet:

Monster.com's security page for users:

http://help.monster.com/besafe

Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Intel Corp., the world's largest semiconductor maker, began building its first computer-chip manufacturing plant in China, a $2.5 billion investment.

Intel Chairman Craig Barrett is hosting a ceremony today in Dalian, in northeastern China, on the site of what will become the company's first chip factory in Asia. Intel already has plants for testing and assembling products in other parts of China, the world's biggest market for chips.

Intel, which announced the project in March, aims to begin production at the plant by 2010. The factory will bring the Santa Clara, California-based company's total investment in China to almost $4 billion, Barrett said. The plant will give Intel better access to computer factories in China, as the company seeks to regain sales lost to Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Intel plans to employ 1,200 people at the Dalian plant in China, its first factory in a new location in 15 years. It will begin hiring this year, with most of the recruitment taking place in the second half of 2008 through China's universities, said Vice President Kirby Jefferson, who heads the plant that is also known as Fab 68.

The plant will ``be an integral part of our global manufacturing network, while bringing us closer to our customers and partners in China,'' Barrett said.

The Dalian plant will make chipsets, the supporting semiconductors that link Intel's main product, microprocessors, to the rest of the computer.

Intel also plans to donate 8-inch chip-manufacturing equipment to the Dalian municipal government and the Dalian University of Technology to help establish a 348 million yuan ($46 million) semiconductor technology institute, Barrett said.

It joins STMicroelectronics NV, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc. in building factories in China.

ALTHOUGH collective wage bargaining was being used by more companies, it still needed promotion, the Shanghai Trade Union said yesterday.

Along with the Shanghai Labor and Social Security Bureau and the Shanghai Enterprise Confederation, the union will have a conference promoting collecting wage bargaining this afternoon.

Under collective bargaining, a company's salaries are set after discussion and voting by all the employees.

"Wages are the key issue which directly influences the relationships between workers and employers," said Wu Meng, an official of the Shanghai Trade Union.

"We encourage employers to set up collective bargaining with their workers to ensure that everyone can get a share of the company's success," he said.

Shanghai began collective bargaining in 1998 and by the end of June this year, 46,600 businesses in the city had joined the system which covered about 1.45 million employees.

But the union said this was not nearly enough.

"There were more than 500,000 businesses at the end of last year," Wu said. "So those which have set up collective bargaining only account for a small portion."

Wu said there were 49,000 private businesses in the city and it might be difficult to get every private company involved in collective bargaining because many workers were unaware of their rights.

A union survey found that most employees in privately-owned enterprises thought wages should only be set by the employers.

"They don't believe that workers can negotiate wages with employers," Wu said.