Apple has $209 billion in cash on hand.
California law requires Apple Inc. to pay its workers for being searched before they leave retail stores, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Thursday.
A group of Apple workers filed a class-action lawsuit against the tech giant, charging they were required to submit to searches before leaving the stores but were not compensated for the time those searches required. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case is now pending, asked the California Supreme Court to clarify whether state law requires compensation.
In a decision written by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the court said an industrial wage order defines hours worked as “the time during which an employee is subject to the control of an employer, and includes all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work, whether or not required to do so.”
I repeat, Apple has $209 billion in cash on hand. Since it’s really hard to imagine how much even just one billion dollars really is, this demonstration should give you a very good idea. One billion dollars is way, way, way more than you think it is.
Apple has 209 times that in cash on hand.
Let me get this right, the fact(not a suggestion) that Apple searches it’s employees isn’t the key issue?
Aren’t some of these the same Apple Store employees that Apple trusts to assist users with recovery of very private information? Yet Apple won’t let them off the premise without a thorough frisking.
The main concern from the tech sector media is that those staff aren’t paid for the frisking time!
America the land of freedom and opportunity, bend over please!
American movies often have drug kingpins as sympathetic characters, and a very visually appealing demonstration of that is attractive women cutting drugs while naked, because naked women don’t have anywhere to hide drugs when they leave.
It’s no wonder why so many of us are okay with invasive searches as a condition of normal employment.
cpcf,
Yeah, it would be interesting to see that case go to court too. I hear that employees of precious mineral mines can be searched even more extremely, but for a worker at a retail store, good god apple’s being petty. What a terrible precedent that sets for the industry. Apple doesn’t even trust it’s own employees over random customers who walk freely in and out through the door.
My gut feeling is that the apple employees would have a greater likelihood of winning over being illegally detained by apple every day rather than being searched.
I hadn’t heard about apple doing this to it’s staff, but labor laws are pretty strict about this sort of thing. Just about anything employees do on behalf of the company needs to be compensated. They’re not allowed to tell employees to do anything on personal time, even waiting. Not the case here, but employees are legally entitled to be paid even for business phone calls they take at home on behalf of the company. This is the only ruling that makes sense for systematically not compensating employees for their time.
Where they really get you though is by labeling certain kinds of employees “exempt”, which means the law excludes you from legal overtime pay protections. For this reason unpaid overtime is very common in software shops. I no longer work as an employee, but when I did some weeks I’d have to work 20+ hours overtime and not see a dime for it. And unlike apple store staffers, there isn’t a legal recourse because the positions are legally exempt 🙁
And this is one more proof of the so called “America exceptionalism”, i.e., let business contracts overrule the letter of labor laws. Unluckily, such a bad example for the rest of the world doesn’t end here, there is also lobbyists (legal bribery), direct appointment of individuals to key positions of other government branches (check and balance be damned), almost immunity when still on power (what a stupid premise), lies protected by “free speech”, and on and on.
Now every “would be tyrant” know what they have to do to stick to power, and please the elite, without raising huge criticism from the international community, and they are doing it, reforming the power structure of their countries.
The powerless has urgency, the powerful has patience, looks like the latter is winning on this century.
Yes, it’s incredibly abusive, and the rules really need to be adjusted to reflect reality. Being a software grunt shouldn’t automatically get you lumped into the same category as management.
That video is actually much better than I expected when I saw the thumbnail.
Cracker Barrel used to do that too, back in the day. They made all their employees, included tipped employees who only made 2.xx /hour to wait till the manager was available to let them out. They got sued and the employees won !
What the hell? Any place where there were searches at the end of the day… I would have worked there one day, and I would tell them to eat a bag of dicks.
Apple is the worse, with the whole anti-right to repair stuff going on, and their forced obsolescence and overpriced garbage, why would anyone with any sort of morals actually buy Apple products?
I hear they support proper recycling… yeah, their software bricks the phone, they sell a used one to the victim, then turn around and unbrick that phone to sell it again. One ‘bricked’ phone gives them 600 bucks… no wonder they have over 200 billion.
A new trend in the U.S. is for there to be a police officer sitting near the entrance of their stores acting as their personal security guard. I would certainly make them pay out of pocket for that service rather than make tax payers fit the bill for a store with 0 real theft prevention measures. Of course putting cable locks, metal cages, and something more secure than enormous glass walls in would ruin Apple’s illusions.
Unfortunately Amazon workers got screwed by the courts for essentially the same thing, so this will be overturned on appeal.
No defending anything else about Apple’s behaviour here, but the police officers outside their stores (and other retail and office locations) are usually off-duty officers being paid directly by the company.
For instance, City of Seattle has a specific policy which governs the behaviour of employed off-duty police officers
https://www.seattle.gov/police-manual/title-5—employee-conduct/5120—off-duty-employment
Now, I’m all for business, especially for honest business. I’ve come out on this forum and others saying exactly that repeatedly, to the point where I’m sometimes subjected to ridiculous ad hominem attacks for it. Part of that honesty, though, goes towards how your employees are treated. Let me break this down, not that Apple will listen. If Apple requires them to wait in line to be searched (not even sure how legal that bit would be if challenged) at the end of each day, and if said employees are on an hourly pay schedule… then, hey Apple, you have to pay them! Duh! They could probably challenge the search based on illegal detention laws, and they should! That’s what I’d want to do, if this were me. Screw getting paid to wait to get searched, I’d rather not be prejudged a criminal at all. If a company doesn’t trust me not to be a criminal, then why in the world hire me in the first place?
Honest business, yes, but Steve Jobs was hardly an honest businessman. His abusive world-view still infects Apple.
Some people would take exception to you implying any business which isn’t a coop is honest. 😉
People are very ignorant of employment laws, sometimes willfully ignorant, and employers take advantage of that. Employees will let a lot of shit slide or eat it up. (I’m in a right-ward state, so consider that when reading this.)
I guarantee someone at Apple is well aware this is illegal, but they’re playing the odds to save some money knowing people will put up with it “for the good of the company” or not know it’s illegal.