After letting employees work remotely for a good long while due to fear of the coronavirus, Apple is now asking its workers to come back for a measly three days a week (while also giving them a month of no-questions-asked remote time per year).
A sizable number of employees, meanwhile, are absolutely not okay with that:
Some Apple employees are pushing back against the company's plans to have employees come back to the office, saying such policies will make the tech giant "younger, whiter, (and) more male-dominated."
The group, "Apple Together," which comprises some 200 employees of the company's 165,000 in total, released an open letter to Apple's executive team last week titled: "Thoughts on Office-bound Work."
And boy, do these folks have thoughts about it!
Apple will likely always find people willing to work here, but our current policies requiring everyone to relocate to the office their team happens to be based in, and being in the office at least 3 fixed days of the week, will change the makeup of our workforce. It will make Apple younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied, in short, it will lead to privileges deciding who can work for Apple, not who'd be the best fit.
Privileges like "being born in the the right place so you don't have to relocate", or "being young enough to start a new life in a new city/country" or "having a stay-at-home spouse who will move with you". And privileges like being born into a gender that society doesn't expect the majority of care-work from, so it's easy to disappear into an office all day, without doing your fair share of unpaid work in society. Or being rich enough to pay others to do your care-work for you.
Instead of throwing money at the problem and just increasing referral bonuses to replace those of our colleagues, who left over the executive team's inflexibility, how about we create a work environment where everyone, who wants to work at Apple, is able to do so?
I gotta be honest with you, it doesn't sound like these folks "want to work at Apple" too much.
I mean, if you respond this way to being asked to come into work for three days a week, how are you gonna respond if they ask you to work a few extra hours in the lead-up to the next Keynote event?
Good luck, Apple workers! And good luck especially to Apple! You earned it!
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