This article is surprisingly hostile to workers organizing for better working conditions against the world’s largest corporation.
Even setting aside that whole thing, here’s what might happen if Apple doesn’t support remote work: talented people that want remote work will quit and go work at Facebook, Google, and other companies that now support full-time remote. Maybe that works out well for Apple, maybe it doesn’t.
This article is surprisingly hostile to workers organizing for better working conditions against the world’s largest corporation.
It’s not like their pre-COVID work conditions were harsh. I think Gruber’s point is that the group that wrote the letter seems quite entitled, especially given the lengths Apple has gone through to accommodate their employees.
Like it or not, what Gruber wrote is true: companies aren’t democracies.
The average worker in America would love to have half the amenities and perks these folks get.
Why is your takeaway that the Apple employees are “entitled” , in a negative way, rather than that the average worker in America should be entitled to more?
Indeed, companies are not democracies, but comparing them to countries isn’t really accurate, because unlike countries, people can and do just leave. If they’re dictatorships, they’re dictatorships in a world of open borders, where each dictator is competing to attract citizens.
Why is your takeaway that the Apple employees are “entitled” , in a negative way, rather than that the average worker in America should be entitled to more?
The entitlement I’m referring to is the how dare you tell me I have to work in-person some of the time vibe that comes through the letter.
Of course the average worker should get more; that doesn’t mean they should take what they have for granted. They have friends and family members with shitty jobs; they know they’re far removed from what they have to deal with or the so-called essential workers who drive their buses and deliver their food.
> Why is your takeaway that the Apple employees are “entitled” , in a negative way, rather than that the average worker in America should be entitled to more?
It's a good question, and I could also turn it around and ask what makes someone think that they aren't entitled to something they don't have the power to obtain? Bottom line, there are big frictions in hiring, so just because a worker does something that doesn't get them instantly fired doesn't mean that, in equilibrium, this is something that businesses have to put up with. By the same token, just because a company makes a decision that doesn't instantly result in most of their workers leaving doesn't mean that it's a decision that workers need to put up with over the long term. It takes time for these adjustments to work out.
At the end of the day, the labor market is a market with really big frictions, and you should think of sustainable agreements as something that happens over a decade or so rather than something that happens over the course of a week. You may get the ocassional situation where a company shuts down a plant that decides to unionize right away, or you may have a situation where lots of workers instantly walk out when the company restricts their ability to bring more demands into the office, but in both of these cases, the exception proves the rule in that these are considered newsworthy events due to them being so rare. In most situations, the resulting equilibrium takes a while to reach, especially as it has to be settled over the entire business cycle. During each recession, workers have less bargaining power and during each boom they have more. Immigration policy, trade policy, labor law all adjust and influence the relevant bargaining power as well. Over time these ebbs and flows settle on an accepted level of what workers can and can't do that applies to most companies, but you can always cherry pick examples where a particularly desperate company or a particularly desperate local labor market caves. This type of cherry picking isn't going to tell you what the stable equilibrium is.
Companies are democracies because they need the people involved to do stuff.
Just because most Americans are oin a position of either horrible conditions or death, doesn't mean they have to be.
It seems much more entitled to me that apples management expects to control where people are during the day, even after deriving all kinds of value from them
I don’t think this is as clear a worker working conditions issue as some are suggesting it is.
For example, a lot of people prefer coming to the office and not having to conduct meetings remotely. Would you be ok with them demanding that they have the right to conduct entirely in person meetings in cases where they feel they will be more productive doing so? What if they say that they are exhausted by Zoom fatigue and don’t believe they should have to conduct remote meetings when they are coming into the office already.
And they would have a strong argument that they have oriented their lives based on years and decades of Apple requirements (about coming to office everyday). Why should they be the ones to suffer because of the demands of people who made permanent changes based on what was obviously a temporary situation, even if it lasted about a year longer than many expected.
I don’t think the worker conditions aspect is as clear cut as some are suggesting.
So, I did a six month consulting gig at Apple Retail Software Engineering.
I knew plenty of Apple employees who couldn’t afford to live closer to the office than way west of San Jose. Many had a ~30 minute commute to the place where they could pick up one of the ubiquitous Apple buses.
From there it was a minimum two to three hour ride to the office, but they had good wifi on the bus, so they could at least get work done while in transit.
Once they got to the office, they would have a meeting or two, or go to lunch, and then hop back on the bus to go back home. Rinse and repeat.
Virtually their entire work day was spent actually on the bus, and not in the actual office.
IMO, Apple could seriously benefit from a lot more people working remotely 100% of the time. I’ve never understood why Tim pushes so hard to force everyone to return to the “office”, when for many the office is actually the bus.
> I can’t help but think that the problem for Apple is that they’ve grown so large that they’ve wound up hiring a lot of people who aren’t a good fit for Apple, and that it was a mistake for Apple to ever hook up a company-wide Slack. Companies are not democracies, but the employees writing these letters sure seem to think Apple is one. It’s not, and if it were, the company would sink in a snap.
I do agree with this sentiment, especially when it comes to keeping personal politics out of the office. It can feel distracting, unfair, and suffocating for productive workers to be surrounded by loud, aggressive activists who seemingly don’t care about the company and its mission as much as spending their hours on letters, political discussions, and activist activities. That said I somehow feel differently about the “remote work” topic, maybe because it feels like it directly pertains to work and productivity and employee retention. This article feels a bit too dismissive and verges more on a blind defense of a potential policy misstep.
Employees looking for wfh are suffocating to the productive workers who are just looking to get stuff done, same as any other politics. There's no difference. Where you work is a subset of what you're doing, and the relation ship is for owners to tell you what to do, and for you to do it. The mission of the company is what the owners want, not you.
I'm not FAANG material (nor do I desire to be), but boy am I glad I get to code my little marketing front ends from home for my team of three, if I so choose.
While I can understand one might see some reasons for remote work to be 'pandering,'* it's deliciously like the smug, hip Mac stand-in from the Mac/Windows commercials to suggest that a reduction in commutes and environmental improvement is "pandering." Again, if this kind of scorn is what people face for asking for a chance to self determine where they are productive, I'm all the more happy to be outside of Silicon Valley.
* while not Apple's problem, for those outside of Apple, I've heard that many disabled workers have had to fight tooth and nail for accommodations. Props to Apple for accommodations being easy, but - is it pandering?
It might be extreme, but I think employee should have to earn the right to work from home. It should not be assumed nor automatically granted, unless it’s for a documented severe physical limitation. Reading over this letter, and others like it at similar companies just sounds like a lot of spoiled over paid people and think they are special. There’s a great sense of entitlement wafting up from the page.
Even setting aside that whole thing, here’s what might happen if Apple doesn’t support remote work: talented people that want remote work will quit and go work at Facebook, Google, and other companies that now support full-time remote. Maybe that works out well for Apple, maybe it doesn’t.