In an article on Apple’s retail employees, The Verge highlights the desperate financial and emotional issues faced by the workforce. The in-depth piece includes interviews from several current and former store employees who complain that Apple’s corporate workplace policies and inaction against complaints cause harm to the employees’ mental health and their careers.
Recent employees’ feedback on the work conditions at one of the biggest tech companies in the world has been shocking and their frustration with the company pushed the corporate and retail employees to organize and start the #AppleToo movement. Although the departure and termination of the movement’s leaders from the company have left it in a doldrum, it did very effectively highlight that all is not well. Employees’ #AppleToo stories resonate with the heartbreaking experiences shared in the new article which reveal the underlining problem is the lack of accountability of managers at the company.
Apple’s turns a blind eye towards the well-being and growth of retail employees
Starting with the unfortunate death of a retail employee, Zoe Schiffer writes that Mark Calivas’s friends believed that he committed suicide because he slid into depression after working for a biased and prejudiced store manager. After filing several complaints to no avail, he took a medical leave to deal with this mental health.
The story illustrates a potentially widespread problem for Apple’s frontline workers. When something goes wrong — a bad manager, a missed paycheck, an untenable onslaught of work — many say they have no one to turn to for help. “Corporate makes decisions based on what they think will work in the stores without talking to people who work in the stores,” a former colleague says.
This struggle echoes a complaint made by some employees in Cupertino, who’ve said that the employee relations team — Apple’s version of human resources — is more concerned with protecting the company than its workforce.
The article further explains that employees’ ambitions at the company are dampened by the corporate’s response and their growth is in the hands of store managers who do not always see them as humans.
The Verge spoke with 16 current and former employees on Apple’s retail, support, and sales teams who say their complaints about working conditions and pay have largely been ignored. Some say they are governed more by algorithms and systems than actual managers, making it difficult to get holistic help. All of them note that while they came into the job believing in Apple’s mission, they see a profound breakdown in how the company’s corporate values translate to the frontlines.
“They say our soul is our people but it really didn’t feel like that to me,” a former employee says.
The Cupertino tech giant must pay heed to the concerning problems faced by its people. Because not just a few, several employees have shared the same experiences. Read the complete article here.
