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The parent appeared to show hypocrisy because the businesses espoused certain separate non-contradictory ideas and not others. The businesses were never pro-uni

• user3939382 4y ago
  It's not "hypocrisy" it's lying. They pretend to care about x, y, and z and they don't and never did. It's marketing, it's a lie. Usually they have plausible deniability. In the case of giving a shit about their workers, they don't because they have to publicly fight unionization to have any hope of slowing or stopping it.
  • abirch 4y ago
    When did Apple ever pretend to care about supporting unions?
    • user3939382 4y ago
      They, like many companies, pretend to care about their workers. They, like many companies, don’t. They care about profit, period. Neither do they care about the environment, gay rights, privacy, or whatever other issue they pretend to care about.
      • MichaelZuo 4y ago
        This seems like two users talking past each other. How about reframing it : Companies can not 'care' about anything because companies are legal vehicles that do not have agency. The individual people that make up the company obviously care about these things to varying extents. I highly doubt it's literally zero for any company >100 employees. Although it's theoretically possible for all the 'care' to perfectly cancel each other out (e.g. half the employees for and half against something) it seems unlikely in Apple's case.
        • user3939382 4y ago
          If you look at other posts by this user, they’re convinced Apple has real values beyond profit. I don’t think it does. Values are a marketing tool. If it was legal and they could profit $300M by killing thousands of people they would do it. Go read about the nervous systems of people failing from the solvents they use the clean the phone screens on the assembly lines. You think Tim Cook is up at night worrying about these people? He’s not.
          • wowyallsuck 4y ago
            It’s hyperbole to suggest that many people at any company would say “yes, let’s kill thousands of people to increase profits 1%”. Instead they would say “let’s use this contractor, they’re 1% cheaper” never considering that the difference is made up from decreased safety that kills people. Society only tends to equate these two kinds of cases when action causes very direct harm.
            • user3939382 4y ago
              I believe they would do it with full knowledge, and when they don’t have full knowledge that’s also intentional. They cultivate plausible deniability for these things they “coincidentally” profit from. Which is precisely my point with this topic and the unions. Finally for once we see the real ethos. There’s room to have faith in the executives of these megacorporations, I don’t.
        • smoldesu 4y ago
          If companies cannot stand for something, they'll fall for anything. That's the problem with Google (remember "don't be evil"?), Facebook (or, Meta) and Apple as well. Companies are not structured to care, even from a regulatory perspective. They are structured to make money and regulated by a set of democratic principles. While what you're saying may well be true, it doesn't prevent bad influences from compromising values you think are immutable. We worship Bell Labs on this website too, but their company culture and "hacker identity" didn't prevent Room 641A from happening. This "unlikely in Apple's case" business seems so baseless when the entire industry wears indecision on it's sleeve. Even Apple cannot promise human rights to all of their customers, loathe as this site is to hear it.
• smoldesu 4y ago
  Apple cares about gay rights insofar as it sells iPhones. As evidenced by their business in China, they will bend any belief (even "privacy is a human right") if the money is there.
• uni_rule 4y ago
  It's just further proof that they take those stances as a pure emotionless calculation made as soon as they calculated doing so would not negatively impact them financially. At such a scale these companoes rarely speak genuine activism, just money. Since unions are are always deemed a negative in the realm of pure bean counting it's just further proof their stances are hollow financial calculations made for public appeal rather than actual activism because the values between these two actions are politically inconsistent in terms of modern progressive but make perfect sense if you see the world as a bean counting contraption.