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U.S. labor agency investigating two complaints from Apple workers

144 points by robbiet480 5y ago

teakettle42 5y ago
"The NLRB investigates all charges it receives."
- onion2k 5y ago
  The investigations aren't why it's newsworthy. The fact that Apple employees are being bold enough to file complaints is. They're quite unusual, especially in tech.
  - teakettle42 5y ago
    Apple employs 90,000 people in the US; there are two complaints, one of which was filed by someone who has an extensive axe to grind: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html I'll let you make up your own mind about the likely merits of their specific complaints. As far as the article and it's headline, "U.S. labor agency investigating..." is clearly intended to imply that existence of such an investigation is notable, when in fact: "The NLRB receives about 20,000 to 30,000 charges per year from employees, unions and employers covering a range of unfair labor practices described in Section 8 of the Act."
krisrm 5y ago
Unrelated to the article, but is it as incredibly discouraging to everyone esle as it is to me, to see over 2/3rds of a Reuters article being "sponsored content" or other ads?
tyingq 5y ago
Her story about having to turn over nude photos of herself, stored on her personally-owned (edit: apparently a work phone) phone, to Apple lawyers sounded very awful. She's got a summary of it all here: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html She also appears to have a few smoking guns, like this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8o4fb3VEAEDVHM?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8o4fb3VEAEDVHM?format=jpg&name=...
- dvt 5y ago
  Sometimes I just hate the internet and its extreme bouts of populism. Everyone wants to air their dirty laundry in public and the Twitter masses celebrate it. We love the clicks, we love the drama, we love hating on Apple, or Google, or this guy or that girl. "Did you hear what he said?" or "Did you hear the rumor that..."—it's a high school cafeteria for adults. We get so caught up in other people's lives, we forget to pay attention to our own. And we thought reality TV was bad.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  The photos were on a company phone, owned and supplied by Apple, for company use. According to the story, the contents of her work phone were legally required to be turned over under as part of the civil discovery process in a trial. Apple does not require you to use company devices for personal, sensitive data, and in fact, is quite clear about the risks inherent in doing so. Nevertheless, she chose to store nude photos on a company device, mixing her company communications with personal communications. How are the consequences of her inappropriate use of company resources Apple's fault?
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    > Apple does not require you to use company devices for personal, sensitive data, and in fact, is quite clear about the risks inherent in doing so. I disagree. In some cases they might be, but I know several people who dogfood on those devices without really understanding what this could entail.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - khazhoux 5y ago
      Even if you skip the legalese when you configure the device... If your company hands you a device, don't then aim the camera at your genitals. If your device has Caffe Macs and Radar apps installed, don't point it at your junk. If you used a device to go over OKR status in the morning, don't point it down your pants at night. If your Photos app alternates between pictures of the whiteboard from your system architecture meeting, and snapshots of your tickly parts, take a moment to think if maybe there's a problem there. I mean... should we cater so much to people that can't figure this out themselves?
khazhoux 5y ago
I have a slight resentment towards the complainant in this article who accused her boss of sexism for giving her feedback on her speaking mannerisms during presentations (voice "going up an octave at the end of statements"). I managed a junior, female engineer who did exactly that --her voice turned up at the end of sentences, making statements always sound like questions-- and I noticed this only happened during stressful presentations, not in regular conversation or team meetings. It destroyed any authority in her voice and made her sound rather childlike. I worked on it with her without mentioning the pitch shift itself (to not make her self-conscious and possibly worsen the problem) but instead I worked to increase her overall confidence when speaking and when running meetings. And I was so happy when I saw her run a multi-team meeting with a strong, steady voice. I resent the notion that if I had mentioned the pitch shift, I could be labeled sexist.
- MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
  I understand that resentment. I hope that the uncertainty, lack of authority, and amateurism that I ascribe to up-speaking is rightly placed. I hope that it's just a matter of cultural norms that young women are the most likely to speak this way. But what if there's nothing intrinsically grating about up-speaking, and instead it only reminds us of young women? I've convinced myself that it's the former, but it wouldn't blow my mind if I were wrong.
  - nightowl_games 5y ago
    Upspeaking is subconsciously used as a defense mechanism. It is advertising a lack of confidence, which is intended to draw a cooperative rather than combative response. It is signalling that "I am unsure of what I am saying". It is based off of the vocal intention of inquisition. It is a subconscious defense mechanism. The bias you speak of is omnipresent. It is also within the speaker. Think about that. The speaker chooses to deploy a style that will bias the listener to view the speaker in a certain way. The bias being present in the speaker is the key factor to understanding this phenomenon. The experiment that I propose is: if the bias was gone, would the speaker still use this speaking technique?
nixpulvis 5y ago
As a previous (male) Apple Cupertino employee, this really resonated with me: "The biggest obstacle for making progress at Apple is the culture of secrecy and alienation."
- bennysomething 5y ago
  But what does that mean? It just sounds so general it could mean many things. Also demanding that employees be allowed to spend time on a slack channel discussing pay seems unreasonable. Do it on your own time and not on company infrastructure. The term "equity" in this instance is not clearly defined, does it mean we all earn the same, or all people with same title earn the same, or maybe there's variation in productivity and that causes inequity?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
nikkinana 5y ago
Gotta unionize.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
One of the employees has posted her version of events online in great detail here: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html Strangely, her timeline about Apple begins in March with an article she published about her health problems. I remember the story was #1 on Hacker News that day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688965 She was having health problems and believed they were the result of toxic waste somewhere on the site of her apartment complex property. I remember that the details of the story didn’t really support her claims as significantly as she suggested. I detailed my concerns in the HN thread about her other toxic waste battle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26689837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26689837 The summary is that she was living in an upper floor apartment but she assumed something in the ground was causing her medical symptoms. She found evidence that an old toxic waste container might be buried somewhere on the 100 acre property surrounding her apartments. She used some questionable measurements (heart rate change of 10bpm and spurious readings from a generic indoor VOC monitor) to try to bolster her story, but it didn’t make sense that the thousands of other people on this site weren’t experiencing severe medical issues even though her apartment wasn’t close to the supposedly toxic ground. She is apparently also waging a significant battle against her apartment complex and the city for the issues she believes were caused by a toxic waste container that was supposedly buried somewhere near her old apartment. I bring this up because she highlights this story as the start of her Apple timeline on her site I linked above and brings it up many times throughout her Apple writings. She seems to imply this was somehow related to her harassment claims at Apple, though I’m not sure what she’s exactly implying with that claim.
- dekhn 5y ago
  your inferences are correct: she is not operating in a way that is rational or consistent, and is lashing out. It happens that her complaints are consistent with what the media wants to publish about the bay area and tech industry.
- linuxftw 5y ago
  Many people are sensitive to VOCs at levels most people aren't. I know several people that cannot be around strong synthetic fragrance (aka, unregulated VOCs) or it makes them feel ill. Whether it's a barrel of waste, or just chemical laden construction materials, most likely she was very much experiencing real health problems. Her blog is kind of hard to follow, and she seems a little nutty, but if her boss indeed tried to 'hook her up' with somebody, that seems like it could be considered harassment in some form.
samizdis 5y ago
Not sure about the claimant's voice actually "going up an octave at the end of statements", but such speech patterns are common. I noticed this everywhere in Australia, especially among younger people, and regardless of sex/gender. There's plenty of material written about it, such as Speech Patterns: Uptalking [1] (which has a section about its prevalence in Australia), and there's an interesting if navel-gazing BBC article [2] from 2014, The unstoppable march of the upward inflection? - note the question mark in the headline there. (The article mentions how bosses/older people tend to frown on this tic; quite a good read, IMO.) And re the written word, I've increasingly noticed question marks in non-interrogative text (including on HN), which to me is the same thing as the uplift terminator in speech. Matt Levine [3], the Bloomberg finance writer, tends to do this a lot in his Money Stuff column/newsletter, in fact his writing is littered with this device. I really don't understand why some people react so negatively to what I'd describe as quite a nuanced form of expression, unless it's along the lines of grammar pedants who don't appreciate that language always evolves; who imagine that the evolution ended when they learnt to speak and write. I'd appreciate feedback on my thoughts/observations here, from other HN folk? [1] https://www.thoughtco.com/uptalk-high-rising-terminal-1692574 https://www.thoughtco.com/uptalk-high-rising-terminal-169257... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28708526 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28708526 [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
dekhn 5y ago
all of the best advice I've received, in terms of having a positive impact on my career, has been tone policing. I've learned (as a mildly autistic person) that only a small number of people have the confidence to tell me what I'm saying wrong, and how I'm saying it wrong, and what to say to have more impact. I would love to understand the psychology of taking people helping you and turning it into oppression. Some of the best tone policing I've received has been from women. The idea that people are getting tone policed and instead consider it being sexist is interesting to me.
advisedwang 5y ago
As I mentioned in the other thread [1] the Sept 1 charge (shutting down pay discussion channel in slack) is right on a current battleground for labour rights in the US. With new pro-labour NLRB chair and general council its highly likely they are going to push hard on this charge to try and reinforce rights to organize in company spaces. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28372867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28372867
- j_walter 5y ago
  Not to mention the Slack platform is meant for team discussions on work time. Apple is well within their rights to be shutting down pay discussions on company time and on a company platform. Now if they were to do so in the break room or cafeteria then that is a different story.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Apple is well within their rights to be shutting down pay discussions on company time and on a company platform. No, they aren't, selectively; they can comprehensively ban non-work discussions of all kinds, but if they don't, since discussions are covered as employee organizing/mutual aid, they cannot selectively be banned (in the US) without violating the National Labor Relations Act and (often) state labor relations law, as well.
  - advisedwang 5y ago
    > Apple is well within their rights to be shutting down pay discussions on company time and on a company platform That's simply not what the legal precedent says. It is an "unfair labour practice" to forbid workers doing collective action like discussing pay in a venue where you let them have other kinds of general discussion.

144 points by robbiet480 5y ago

teakettle42 5y ago

"The NLRB investigates all charges it receives."

onion2k 5y ago
The investigations aren't why it's newsworthy. The fact that Apple employees are being bold enough to file complaints is. They're quite unusual, especially in tech.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  Apple employs 90,000 people in the US; there are two complaints, one of which was filed by someone who has an extensive axe to grind: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html I'll let you make up your own mind about the likely merits of their specific complaints. As far as the article and it's headline, "U.S. labor agency investigating..." is clearly intended to imply that existence of such an investigation is notable, when in fact: "The NLRB receives about 20,000 to 30,000 charges per year from employees, unions and employers covering a range of unfair labor practices described in Section 8 of the Act."

krisrm 5y ago

Unrelated to the article, but is it as incredibly discouraging to everyone esle as it is to me, to see over 2/3rds of a Reuters article being "sponsored content" or other ads?

tyingq 5y ago

Her story about having to turn over nude photos of herself, stored on her personally-owned (edit: apparently a work phone) phone, to Apple lawyers sounded very awful. She's got a summary of it all here: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html She also appears to have a few smoking guns, like this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8o4fb3VEAEDVHM?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8o4fb3VEAEDVHM?format=jpg&name=...

dvt 5y ago
Sometimes I just hate the internet and its extreme bouts of populism. Everyone wants to air their dirty laundry in public and the Twitter masses celebrate it. We love the clicks, we love the drama, we love hating on Apple, or Google, or this guy or that girl. "Did you hear what he said?" or "Did you hear the rumor that..."—it's a high school cafeteria for adults. We get so caught up in other people's lives, we forget to pay attention to our own. And we thought reality TV was bad.
teakettle42 5y ago
The photos were on a company phone, owned and supplied by Apple, for company use. According to the story, the contents of her work phone were legally required to be turned over under as part of the civil discovery process in a trial. Apple does not require you to use company devices for personal, sensitive data, and in fact, is quite clear about the risks inherent in doing so. Nevertheless, she chose to store nude photos on a company device, mixing her company communications with personal communications. How are the consequences of her inappropriate use of company resources Apple's fault?
- saagarjha 5y ago
  > Apple does not require you to use company devices for personal, sensitive data, and in fact, is quite clear about the risks inherent in doing so. I disagree. In some cases they might be, but I know several people who dogfood on those devices without really understanding what this could entail.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    Even if you skip the legalese when you configure the device... If your company hands you a device, don't then aim the camera at your genitals. If your device has Caffe Macs and Radar apps installed, don't point it at your junk. If you used a device to go over OKR status in the morning, don't point it down your pants at night. If your Photos app alternates between pictures of the whiteboard from your system architecture meeting, and snapshots of your tickly parts, take a moment to think if maybe there's a problem there. I mean... should we cater so much to people that can't figure this out themselves?

khazhoux 5y ago

I have a slight resentment towards the complainant in this article who accused her boss of sexism for giving her feedback on her speaking mannerisms during presentations (voice "going up an octave at the end of statements"). I managed a junior, female engineer who did exactly that --her voice turned up at the end of sentences, making statements always sound like questions-- and I noticed this only happened during stressful presentations, not in regular conversation or team meetings. It destroyed any authority in her voice and made her sound rather childlike. I worked on it with her without mentioning the pitch shift itself (to not make her self-conscious and possibly worsen the problem) but instead I worked to increase her overall confidence when speaking and when running meetings. And I was so happy when I saw her run a multi-team meeting with a strong, steady voice. I resent the notion that if I had mentioned the pitch shift, I could be labeled sexist.

MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
I understand that resentment. I hope that the uncertainty, lack of authority, and amateurism that I ascribe to up-speaking is rightly placed. I hope that it's just a matter of cultural norms that young women are the most likely to speak this way. But what if there's nothing intrinsically grating about up-speaking, and instead it only reminds us of young women? I've convinced myself that it's the former, but it wouldn't blow my mind if I were wrong.
- nightowl_games 5y ago
  Upspeaking is subconsciously used as a defense mechanism. It is advertising a lack of confidence, which is intended to draw a cooperative rather than combative response. It is signalling that "I am unsure of what I am saying". It is based off of the vocal intention of inquisition. It is a subconscious defense mechanism. The bias you speak of is omnipresent. It is also within the speaker. Think about that. The speaker chooses to deploy a style that will bias the listener to view the speaker in a certain way. The bias being present in the speaker is the key factor to understanding this phenomenon. The experiment that I propose is: if the bias was gone, would the speaker still use this speaking technique?

nixpulvis 5y ago

As a previous (male) Apple Cupertino employee, this really resonated with me: "The biggest obstacle for making progress at Apple is the culture of secrecy and alienation."

bennysomething 5y ago
But what does that mean? It just sounds so general it could mean many things. Also demanding that employees be allowed to spend time on a slack channel discussing pay seems unreasonable. Do it on your own time and not on company infrastructure. The term "equity" in this instance is not clearly defined, does it mean we all earn the same, or all people with same title earn the same, or maybe there's variation in productivity and that causes inequity?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

nikkinana 5y ago

Gotta unionize.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

One of the employees has posted her version of events online in great detail here: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html Strangely, her timeline about Apple begins in March with an article she published about her health problems. I remember the story was #1 on Hacker News that day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688965 She was having health problems and believed they were the result of toxic waste somewhere on the site of her apartment complex property. I remember that the details of the story didn’t really support her claims as significantly as she suggested. I detailed my concerns in the HN thread about her other toxic waste battle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26689837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26689837 The summary is that she was living in an upper floor apartment but she assumed something in the ground was causing her medical symptoms. She found evidence that an old toxic waste container might be buried somewhere on the 100 acre property surrounding her apartments. She used some questionable measurements (heart rate change of 10bpm and spurious readings from a generic indoor VOC monitor) to try to bolster her story, but it didn’t make sense that the thousands of other people on this site weren’t experiencing severe medical issues even though her apartment wasn’t close to the supposedly toxic ground. She is apparently also waging a significant battle against her apartment complex and the city for the issues she believes were caused by a toxic waste container that was supposedly buried somewhere near her old apartment. I bring this up because she highlights this story as the start of her Apple timeline on her site I linked above and brings it up many times throughout her Apple writings. She seems to imply this was somehow related to her harassment claims at Apple, though I’m not sure what she’s exactly implying with that claim.

dekhn 5y ago
your inferences are correct: she is not operating in a way that is rational or consistent, and is lashing out. It happens that her complaints are consistent with what the media wants to publish about the bay area and tech industry.
linuxftw 5y ago
Many people are sensitive to VOCs at levels most people aren't. I know several people that cannot be around strong synthetic fragrance (aka, unregulated VOCs) or it makes them feel ill. Whether it's a barrel of waste, or just chemical laden construction materials, most likely she was very much experiencing real health problems. Her blog is kind of hard to follow, and she seems a little nutty, but if her boss indeed tried to 'hook her up' with somebody, that seems like it could be considered harassment in some form.

samizdis 5y ago

Not sure about the claimant's voice actually "going up an octave at the end of statements", but such speech patterns are common. I noticed this everywhere in Australia, especially among younger people, and regardless of sex/gender. There's plenty of material written about it, such as Speech Patterns: Uptalking [1] (which has a section about its prevalence in Australia), and there's an interesting if navel-gazing BBC article [2] from 2014, The unstoppable march of the upward inflection? - note the question mark in the headline there. (The article mentions how bosses/older people tend to frown on this tic; quite a good read, IMO.) And re the written word, I've increasingly noticed question marks in non-interrogative text (including on HN), which to me is the same thing as the uplift terminator in speech. Matt Levine [3], the Bloomberg finance writer, tends to do this a lot in his Money Stuff column/newsletter, in fact his writing is littered with this device. I really don't understand why some people react so negatively to what I'd describe as quite a nuanced form of expression, unless it's along the lines of grammar pedants who don't appreciate that language always evolves; who imagine that the evolution ended when they learnt to speak and write. I'd appreciate feedback on my thoughts/observations here, from other HN folk? [1] https://www.thoughtco.com/uptalk-high-rising-terminal-1692574 https://www.thoughtco.com/uptalk-high-rising-terminal-169257... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28708526 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28708526 [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

dekhn 5y ago

all of the best advice I've received, in terms of having a positive impact on my career, has been tone policing. I've learned (as a mildly autistic person) that only a small number of people have the confidence to tell me what I'm saying wrong, and how I'm saying it wrong, and what to say to have more impact. I would love to understand the psychology of taking people helping you and turning it into oppression. Some of the best tone policing I've received has been from women. The idea that people are getting tone policed and instead consider it being sexist is interesting to me.

advisedwang 5y ago

As I mentioned in the other thread [1] the Sept 1 charge (shutting down pay discussion channel in slack) is right on a current battleground for labour rights in the US. With new pro-labour NLRB chair and general council its highly likely they are going to push hard on this charge to try and reinforce rights to organize in company spaces. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28372867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28372867

j_walter 5y ago
Not to mention the Slack platform is meant for team discussions on work time. Apple is well within their rights to be shutting down pay discussions on company time and on a company platform. Now if they were to do so in the break room or cafeteria then that is a different story.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Apple is well within their rights to be shutting down pay discussions on company time and on a company platform. No, they aren't, selectively; they can comprehensively ban non-work discussions of all kinds, but if they don't, since discussions are covered as employee organizing/mutual aid, they cannot selectively be banned (in the US) without violating the National Labor Relations Act and (often) state labor relations law, as well.
- advisedwang 5y ago
  > Apple is well within their rights to be shutting down pay discussions on company time and on a company platform That's simply not what the legal precedent says. It is an "unfair labour practice" to forbid workers doing collective action like discussing pay in a venue where you let them have other kinds of general discussion.