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SAN FRANCISCO — Apple, known among its Silicon Valley colleagues for a secretive corporate culture where employees are expected to be locked in step with management, is suddenly faced with a problem that was unthinkable a few years ago: employee unrest.
On Friday, Apple CEO Tim Cook answered questions from workers at an all-staff meeting for the first time since his concerns were made public, on issues ranging from employee pay equality to whether the company should stand out more on political issues like Texas. ‘Restrictive abortion law.
According to a recording obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Cook answered only two of the activist employees he said had a few questions they wanted to ask at a meeting with employees around the world. But his response was a remarkable confirmation that the workplace and social issues that have plagued Silicon Valley for several years are rooted in Apple.
Over the past month, more than 500 people who say they are current and former Apple employees posted accounts of verbal abuse, sexual harassment, retaliation and discrimination in the workplace, among other issues, to a group that calls itself “employee-activists.” #AppleToo, said Cher Scarlett and Janneke Parrish, two Apple employees who helped lead the group.
the group started posting some anonymous stories online and encourages colleagues to contact state and federal labor officials regarding their complaints. Their problems and those of the eight current and former employees who spoke to The Times differ; these include workplace conditions, unequal pay, and the company’s business practices.
A common theme is that Apple’s privacy creates a culture that discourages employees from talking about workplace concerns, not with co-workers, the press, or on social media. Employees who spoke to The Times said complaints about troubled managers or colleagues are often dismissed, and employees fear criticizing the way the company does business.
“Apple has a toxic culture of privacy,” said Christine Dehus, who worked at Apple for five years and left in August. “On the one hand, yes, I understand that the piece of privacy is important for product safety, to surprise and delight customers. But it also interferes with other areas of culture where it is prohibitive and damaging.”
Cook and Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s chief human resources, said on Friday that it regularly reviews compensation practices to ensure Apple pays its employees fairly, in response to a question about pay equity.
“When we find any gaps, as we sometimes do, we close them,” Ms O’Brien said.
When asked what Apple is doing to protect its employees from Texas’ abortion restrictions, Mr. Cook said the company was investigating whether it could help with the legal fight against the new law and that health insurance would help Apple employees in Texas pay. they had to go to other states for abortion.
Ms. Parrish said Mr Cook’s comments received a mixed response from Apple employees on the workplace message board Slack. Some employees cheered for Mr. Cook, while others, including him, were disappointed.
Ms. Parrish said she presented a question about the concrete steps Apple is taking to help resolve pay gaps and ensure that more women and people of color are promoted to leadership roles. “We didn’t know about Tim’s answers today,” he said.
Apple has approximately 160,000 employees worldwide, and it was unclear whether the new public complaints reflected systemic or isolated issues occurring at many large companies.
“We are deeply committed and always committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace,” the company said in a statement. “We take all concerns seriously and investigate thoroughly when a concern arises, and out of respect for the privacy of those involved, we do not discuss specific employee issues.”
While the publication of Apple’s workplace issues was notable for many who have followed the company for years, employee activism has become commonplace in Silicon Valley.
three years ago Google employees They marched out of their offices around the world to protest their sexual harassment policies. Last year, Facebook employees protested their companies’ handling of posts by President Donald J. Trump. And there are some companies expressly prohibited discussions These are not business related.
But at Apple, rank and file seemed to do their job with little fuss until recently. Privacy was a feature pushed by the company’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, who was obsessed with preventing leaks about Apple’s new products and maximizing public amazement when promoting them on stage. Employees who spoke to The Times said that over time, this culture has spread to the wider workplace.
“I’ve never met people so afraid to speak out against their employers,” said Ms. Scarlett, who joined Apple in April as a software engineer and has worked at eight other companies.
An Apple spokesperson Company policy He said employees “can talk freely about your wages, hours or working conditions”.
Many current and former employees told The Times that Slack is an important organizing tool for workers. Apple’s silo culture has kept different teams of employees separate from each other, another result of efforts to prevent leaks. Until Apple started using Slack in 2019, there wasn’t a large-scale, popular internal message board where employees could communicate with each other.
Slack became particularly popular when employees were told to work from home at the start of the pandemic. “For many of us, this was our first opportunity to interact with people outside of our own silo,” said Ms. Parrish. Previously, “none of us were aware that anyone else was experiencing this.”
The complaints seem to have an effect. When Apple hired more than 2,000 employees this year, Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook executive Signed a letter of protest to the administration Partly because of what they call “openly racist and sexist remarks” in a book he wrote based on his time on Facebook. Within a few days, Apple fired him. Mr. García Martínez declined to comment on the details of his case.
In May, hundreds of employees signed a letter urging Apple to publicly support the Palestinians during a recent conflict with Israel. And a corporate Slack channel that was set up to organize efforts to force Apple to be more flexible with its remote work arrangements after the pandemic is over now has around 7,500 employees.
Beyond group activism, Apple engages in individual fights that have slipped into the public eye.
Ashley Gjovik, a former engineering program manager at Apple for six years, said: complained to Apple about what he believed were inadequate testing for toxic chemicals in his office for months, and a manager’s sexist comments.
After making her complaints public this year, Ms. Gjovik went on leave and was later fired. said Apple told him He said he was fired for leaking product information and failing to cooperate with the investigation. He said he has filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Justice.
Apple declined to comment on specific employee lawsuits.
Ms. Dehus, who works at Apple to reduce the impact of mining precious minerals in conflict zones, said she left Apple after struggling for several years with the decision to reassign herself to a role she said required more work for less pay. He said Apple tried to reassign him after he complained that the company’s work on minerals had in some cases not resulted in meaningful change in some war-torn countries.
Richard Dahan, who is deaf, said he struggled at his former job at an Apple Store in Maryland for six years after his manager refused to provide a sign language interpreter to communicate with customers. He said he communicated with customers by typing on an iPad, and as a result, some customers refused to work with him. When he told his manager, the manager said it was the customers’ right.
“Do you mind if they say they don’t want to work with someone of color?” Mr Dahan asked in an interview through a sign language interpreter.
An interpreter was eventually appointed. But by then, he said that senior management saw him as a complainant and refused to be promoted.
“Their culture is: Drink our Kool-Aid, buy what we tell you and we’ll get you promoted,” he said. “But if you want something or make noise, then they don’t.”
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