Apple Employees Increasingly Speak Out About Workplace Issues as Company Culture Shifts

Apple employees have increasing spoken out about workplace issues in the past five months, marking a turning point in its company culture.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the operations of the world’s leading tech giant, Apple. With the introduction of Slack for team collaboration, Apple employees also found a platform to discuss hobbies, pets, social issues, and more importantly, the company’s policies which concerned some of them.

Now, Zoe Schiffer of The Verge writes that “Apple’s fortress of secrecy is crumbling from the inside” because some employees have gone public with their grievances with the tech giant and have even filed complaints with the US national labor agency of discrimination and pay inequality.

Since the announcement of the company’s hybrid work model, various reports have claimed that the company’s employees have actively voiced their concerns amongst themselves and shared them with senior management. A group of employees unhappy with the new hybrid work model wrote to CEO Tim Cook requesting him to adopt a more flexible approach to the remote work model. Then, pay equity surveys were crushed, the #AppleToo movement was organized, and recently an engineer was fired who alleged harassment and discrimination.

“There’s a shift in the balance of power going on here” says Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld, who’s been covering Apple since the 1990s. “Not everyone is afraid that their boss at Apple is going to fire them. They’re saying, ‘I’m going to say some bad things about Apple, and if you move against me, it’s going to look bad for you.'”

As the report notes, moving forward, Apple likely won’t be able to stop employees from talking to one another as too many have already met and started to organize. Some have joined non-work Discord channels to talk about pay equity and other issues that span Apple’s various teams.

To many Apple employees, working at the Cupertino company comes with the fact of having to deal with its hierarchical, secretive nature. But to the Apple employees pushing back, it’s a call for a massive internal shift in how the company functions.

Read the in-depth report over at The Verge.