Apple will conduct an assessment of its US employment practices under an agreement with a coalition of investors that includes five New York City pension funds.
The assessment will focus on whether Apple is complying with its official human rights policy as it relates to the “freedom of association and collective bargaining rights of workers in the United States,” the company said in a statement. presentation last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The audit comes amid complaints from federal regulators and employees that the company has repeatedly violated workers’ labor rights when they tried to unionize over the past year. Apple has denied the allegations.
“There is a large apparent gap between Apple’s stated human rights policies regarding worker organizing and its practices,” said New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who helped start the discussion with Apple on behalf of Apple. of the pension funds of the city’s public workers.
As part of its agreement with the investor coalition, which also includes other pension funds for union workers, Apple has agreed to hire an outside firm to conduct the assessment, the coalition said in a letter to the company’s president on Tuesday.
Labor organizing and union campaigns
The letter also presented recommendations for the assessment, including hiring a company that has experience in labor rights and not advising companies on how to avoid unionization. He recommended that the company be “as independent as possible.”
Apple’s federal filing did not explicitly refer to a third party and the company declined to comment further.
Investor coalition members controlled about $7 billion worth of Apple stock as of last week, with a market capitalization of more than $2 trillion. In its financial filing announcing the assessment, Apple offered few details, saying it would conduct the assessment by the end of the year and publish a report related to the assessment.
Last year, workers voted to unionize at two Apple stores, in Townson, Maryland, and in Oklahoma City, and workers at two other stores filed petitions to hold union elections before withdrawing them.
Many workers involved in union organizing at the company said they enjoyed their work and praised their employer, citing benefits such as health care and stock grants and the satisfaction of working with Apple products. But they said they hoped unionization would help them get better pay, more programming participation and more transparency when it comes to getting job assignments and promotions.
In May, Apple announced it would raise its starting hourly minimum wage from $20 to $22, a move some workers interpreted as an effort to undermine their organizing campaigns.
The workers have also filed charges accusing Apple of labor law violations at at least six stores, including charges that the company illegally supervised them, banned union flyers in a break room questioned them about your organization, threatened them to organize and who stated that unionization it would be useless.
The Communications Workers of America, the union representing Apple workers in Oklahoma City, also filed a load accusing Apple of establishing an illegal corporate union at a store in Columbus, Ohio, created and controlled by management with the goal of stifling support for an independent union.
The National Labor Relations Board issued formal complaints in two of the cases, involving stores in Atlanta and New York.
Apple has said that it “strongly disagrees” with the complaints filed with the labor board and that it hopes it can defend itself. The company has emphasized that “regular, open, honest, and direct communication with our team members is a key part of Apple’s collaborative culture.”
The investor coalition behind the job review argues that Apple’s response to union campaigns is at odds with its human rights policy because that policy commits it to uphold the International Labor Organization’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights in the work that It includes “union freedom and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining”.
Mr. Lander, the New York comptroller, said the coalition initially approached Apple’s board of directors last spring to discuss the company’s stance toward union organizing, but got no substantive response.
The coalition then filed a shareholder proposal in September urging Apple to hire an outside company to assess whether the company was living up to its stated commitment to labor rights. The company responded late last year and the two sides reached an agreement in exchange for the coalition withdrawing its proposal, according to Lander.
A coalition of some of the same investors, including New York pension funds, filed a similar proposal at Starbucks, where workers have voted to unionize at more than 250 company-owned stores since the end of 2021. Like Apple, Starbucks has aforementioned its commitment to the standards of the International Labor Organization such as freedom of association and the right to participate in collective bargaining.
But Starbucks has consistently opposed attempts to unionize its employees, and Starbucks has not engaged with the investor coalition to reach an agreement. Jonas Kron, director of advocacy for Trillium Asset Management, one of the investors behind the proposals at both companies, said he hoped the Starbucks proposal would be voted on by the company’s shareholders. The company declined to comment.
The federal labor board has issued a few dozen grievances against Starbucks for violations that include retaliation against workers involved in organizing and discrimination against union workers by introducing new benefits; the company has denied violating labor laws.
