Earlier this year, former Apple software engineer Cher Scarlett received a distraught DM from an Apple retail employee at New York’s Grand Central Station. The employee worked with a union to organize her store, but the partnership dissolved. Adrift, she sent Scarlett to vent. The employee knew Scarlett as the founder of #AppleToo, a campaign launched last summer to shed light on alleged discrimination and harassment in the workplace. Scarlett was an outspoken advocate for workers’ rights and she knew exactly who to call.
Scarlett had recently met an organizer with Workers United at a union workers’ meeting at Starbucks, where she used to work. “I was like, wait a minute. You are in New York. Workers United started in New York. I have a connection.” She made an introduction and the Grand Central campaign was revived. In April they went public with their organizational drive and called themselves Fruit Stand Workers United.
The campaign is one of many union actions taking place in Apple Stores across the country, both publicly and underground. They have increasingly found support from current and former employees at Apple’s offices, thanks in part to a solidarity association called Apple Together, which Scarlett helped create and which grew out of the #AppleToo campaign. The group’s Discord server has grown to more than 250 employees and provides a space to exchange stories, share resources, learn about organizing, and coordinate campaigns. About a third of the group comes from the corporate world, with the rest coming from retail stores and AppleCare. Several vetted union representatives hang out on the Discord, ready to chat with anyone interested in organizing their workplace.
The forum also helps employees recognize when their personal struggles are being shared. “There are a lot of people who have joined our Discord server and say that seeing these stories has allowed them to stand up for themselves,” said Janneke Parrish, a former Apple Maps program manager who helped organize from Apple Together. (Parrish was fired last year after helping organize #AppleToo. Apple has said her firing wasn’t retaliation, but Parrish disagrees.)
Apple’s corporate culture is famously secretive, segregating employees from one another in the interest of protecting upcoming launches. That secrecy surrounding products sometimes extends to working conditions, says an Apple Together organizer, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. But between the introduction of Slack in 2019 and the founding of Apple Together, “this is probably the least silo we’ve been in years,” she says.
The rise of Apple Together coincides with a turning point for the company’s workforce, which has challenged Apple on issues ranging from pay equality to its return to office policies. Workers at the Cumberland Mall in Atlanta petitioned for union elections to the Communication Workers of America in late April, and this month, workers in Towson, Maryland, filed an election to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The Grand Central Station store is collecting signatures and also plans to file a case.
At the Towson site, employees hope to finally have a say in their working conditions, says Kevin Gallagher, who has worked there for several years. “I think there are a lot of misconceptions about the type of work and the skills needed to do the work we do,” he says. “People think, ‘Oh, it’s a store. These must be teenagers who have a job while they’re in college.’ We have people in their fifties and sixties doing highly skilled work here.”
Gallagher recalls how Apple offered free battery replacements to customers in 2016, flooding retail locations with aggrieved customers without making significant headcount changes. (It didn’t help, he says, that exposed iPhone batteries could catch fire during the repair process, which is known in the industry as a “thermal event”.) It seemed to him that no one in business had considered how the program would impact. for store employees. This pattern would resurface in the months and years that followed, he says, such as when the company lifted its mask mandate and several of its colleagues subsequently contracted Covid-19. Apple declined to comment on this story.
