Now Hear This!

Attendees to Nvidia’s Nvision event this week were greeted by some unexpected guests. Union activists from a group called Unite Here have been using such tactics as flyering, light projections, and the distribution of potato chip bags with creative stickers that read “Find the flawed chip …” (see pictures below) to draw attendees’ attentions to Nvidia’s recent product failures.

Nvidia in July announced a massive charge on failing products in some notebook configurations with GPUs and MCPs manufactured with a “certain die/packaging material set.” In full marketing defense mode, the company has released little information and has yet to fully explain the issue. Nor has it stated how exactly many laptops the chips have gone into or what it plans to do about the problems chips and the PCs impacted.

A statement from Jim Dupont, VP of Unite Here International, accuses Nvidia of “putting the burden of Nvidia’s chip failure on consumers. Band-Aids will not fix this; Nvidia must recall their defective chips.”

EDN spoke to a rep for the labor group, who reported a mixed bag of reactions from Nvision attendees to Unite Here’s tactics. “Some people are happy that it’s happening and other people are not,” the rep said.

Unite Here, by the way, is not an electronics industry-based group in any way. It’s a combination of two formerly separate groups, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE). The group’s core issue seems to be with Nvidia vendor Aramark, the food/business services company. It appears that the group’s strategy here is to pressure the GPU maker, so that it will in turn pressure its subcontractor Aramark into negotiating a better deal with the striking service workers Unite Here represents.

Such seemingly roundabout strategies are not unusual. I can recall an IDF passed where I was handed a flyer from an environmental group protesting Intel’s rival AMD. And, as another editor here at EDN noted on a staff call this morning, Nvidia’s “marketing crap” and refusal to detail and fix the situation impacts the lives of its employees and the companies, as well as their respective employees, with which Nvidia does business, like Aramark.

So Unite Here isn’t totally off base with its presence at Nvision. But as a different editor noted on the same call this morning, if groups protested every time there was a tech product problem, there would be a heck of a lot of protesting going on.

What do you think? Is Unite Here out of line at Nvision, or is it Nvidia that’s out of line? Share your thoughts on Unite Here’s efforts or Nvidia’s response to the product failures below.

--Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News