Labor board accuses Apple of suppressing employee discussions

Apple has been accused by the National Labor Relations Board of trying to prevent employees from discussing pay equity and pressuring an engineer who attempted to circulate an online survey about wages to quit.

In a complaint issued last week by the NLRB’s regional office in Oakland, federal labor regulators alleged that Apple has unlawfully blocked discussion among workers in corporate offices by enforcing overly broad confidentiality rules and restricting their activity on the Slack messaging app and social media, as well as hampering their conversations with journalists.

The complaint alleges that the company in 2021 barred employees from creating a Slack channel called #community-pay-equity and prohibited workers from discussing the financial incentives Apple uses to reach sales goals by asserting that the topic included “confidential and proprietary information.”

Apple has publicly denied the allegations. “We strongly disagree with these claims,” a company spokesperson told Reuters. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Times.

According to the complaint, Cher Scarlett, an engineer at Apple, faced reprisals after she participated in Slack discussions about workplace discrimination, helped found a campaign called “Apple Too” modeled after the #MeToo movement that was meant to encourage employees to share their experiences with racism and sexism, and created an online employee survey about pay equity.

Instead of addressing her requests that the company clarify its rules regarding pay discussions, NLRB investigators found, Apple told an attorney representing Scarlett at the time that she needed to stop making social media posts, while also pressing her to go on medical leave and offering her a severance agreement. These actions by the company, the complaint said, unlawfully forced Scarlett to quit.

Apple managers allegedly threatened other employees who posted on social media and in Slack and spoke to the media about workplace concerns, according to the complaint. Some were interrogated about their involvement with Scarlett’s pay equity survey and were told that their activities were being monitored and that they could be demoted, according to the complaint.

Scarlett said in an email that although the process has taken a long time, she’s happy the NLRB is pursuing her case.

“I look forward to Apple’s behavior coming to light to enforce change at the company and industry-wide. I don’t regret standing up to Apple and I will continue to fight for the rights of laborers,” Scarlett said.

Issuing the complaint represents the NLRB’s first step in litigating the case after investigating an unfair labor practice claim submitted by employees and finding merit to the allegations. If a settlement with Apple is not reached, the case will be reviewed by an administrative law judge at a hearing scheduled for June. The judge’s decision on what, if anything, Apple must do to address the issues raised in the complaint could then be appealed to the labor board in Washington and from there it could be appealed to federal court.

The NLRB’s general counsel is asking for a court order that would require Apple to post notices in offices and electronically in Slack and email explaining the rights of employees, as well as to conduct training for managers, supervisors and employees. The NLRB is also looking to force Apple to reinstate Scarlett, compensate her for lost pay and issue an apology letter.

The complaint is the third in recent weeks to hit Apple.

On Sept. 27, the board’s regional office in Los Angeles issued a complaint accusing Apple of requiring employees across the U.S. to sign overly broad confidentiality and noncompete agreements and adhere to sweeping policies on misconduct and social media that violated employees’ ability to exercise their rights under federal labor law. The complaint stems from charges filed in 2021 by Ashley Gjovik, a former senior engineering program manager at the company, who claimed that an email sent by Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, in which he pledged to punish employees who leaked company information, had a chilling effect on workers’ discussions of pay equity and discrimination.

And on Oct. 9, the NLRB’s office in Oakland issued a complaint alleging the company had maintained unlawful work rules and created an impression of surveillance, unfairly enforced policies and wrongly terminated an employee for their involvement in an open letter criticizing a technology entrepreneur Apple had hired. The complaint arose from claims made by Janneke Parrish, a former Texas-based product manager on Apple Maps and a leader of a #MeToo activist movement within Apple, who was fired in 2021.

The complaints by federal regulators highlight ongoing turmoil around organizing efforts by Apple employees both at the iPhone maker’s corporate headquarters and at retail stores. In recent years, the board also has lodged complaints that Apple interrogated its retail workers in New York about their union support and confiscated pro-labor fliers in a store break room, and similarly interrogated employees in an Atlanta store and told staff that they would be in a less advantageous position if they voted for a union.

The company has denied wrongdoing.