Tim Cook faces rare employee unrest over Apple's 'culture of secrecy'

Hundreds of current and former Apple workers are complaining about their work environment, a rarity for the once tight-lipped company

Apple, known among its Silicon Valley peers for a secretive corporate culture in which workers are expected to be in lock step with management, is suddenly facing an issue that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: employee unrest.

On Friday, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, answered questions from workers in an all-staff meeting for the first time since the public surfacing of employee concerns over topics ranging from pay equity to whether the company should assert itself more on political matters like Texas’ restrictive abortion law.

Mr. Cook answered only two of what activist employees said were a number of questions they had wanted to ask in a meeting broadcast to employees around the world, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times. But his response was a notable acknowledgment that the workplace and social issues that have been roiling Silicon Valley for several years have taken root at Apple.

Over the past month, more than 500 people who said they were current and former Apple employees have submitted accounts of verbal abuse, sexual harassment, retaliation and discrimination at work, among other issues, to an employee-activist group that calls itself #AppleToo, said Cher Scarlett and Janneke Parrish, two Apple employees who help lead the group.

The group has begun posting some of the anonymous stories online and has been encouraging colleagues to contact state and federal labor officials with their complaints. Their issues, as well as those of eight current and former employees who spoke to The Times, vary; among them are workplace conditions, unequal pay and the company’s business practices.

A common theme is that Apple’s secrecy has created a culture that discourages employees from speaking out about their workplace concerns — not with co-workers, not with the press and not on social media. Complaints about problematic managers or colleagues are frequently dismissed, and workers are afraid to criticize how the company does business, the employees who spoke to The Times said.

“Apple has this culture of secrecy that is toxic,” said Christine Dehus, who worked at Apple for five years and left in August. “On one hand, yes, I understand the secrecy piece is important for product security, to surprise and delight customers. But it bleeds into other areas of the culture where it is prohibitive and damaging.”

Mr. Cook and Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s human resources chief, said in response to a question about pay equity on Friday that Apple regularly scrutinized its compensation practices to ensure it paid employees fairly.

“When we find any gaps at all, which sometimes we do, we close them,” Ms. O’Brien said.

Asked what Apple was doing to protect its employees from Texas’ abortion restrictions, Mr. Cook said that the company was looking into whether it could aid the legal fight against the new law and that its medical insurance would help pay for Apple workers in Texas if they needed to travel to other states for an abortion.

Mr. Cook’s comments received a mixed reception from Apple employees on Slack, the workplace message board, Ms. Parrish said. Some employees cheered for Mr. Cook, while others, including her, were disappointed.

Ms. Parrish said she had submitted a question about what concrete steps Apple had taken to ensure that pay gaps were resolved and that more women and people of color were being promoted to leadership roles. “With the answers Tim gave today, we weren’t heard,” she said.

Apple has about 160,000 employees around the world, and it was unclear if the newly public complaints reflected systemic problems or isolated issues that happen at many larger corporations.

“We are and have always been deeply committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace,” the company said in a statement. “We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters.”

While the airing of Apple’s workplace issues is remarkable to many people who have followed the company over the years, employee activism has become commonplace in Silicon Valley.

Three years ago, Google employees marched out of their offices around the world to protest sexual harassment policies. Last year, Facebook employees protested their company’s handling of posts by President Donald J. Trump. And some companies have explicitly banned discussions that aren’t work-related.

But at Apple, the rank and file had until recently appeared to be doing their jobs with little fuss. Secrecy was a trait pushed by the company’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, who was obsessed with preventing leaks about Apple’s new products to maximize the public’s surprise when he unveiled them onstage. The employees who spoke to The Times said that, over time, that culture had extended to the broader workplace.

“Never have I met people more terrified to speak out against their employer,” said Ms. Scarlett, who joined Apple as a software engineer in April and has worked at eight other companies.

An Apple spokesman pointed to a company policy that said employees could “speak freely about your wages, hours or working conditions.”

Slack has been a key organizing tool for workers, several current and former employees told The Times. Apple’s siloed culture kept different teams of employees separate from one another, another result of efforts to prevent leaks. There was no wide-scale, popular internal message board for employees to communicate with one another, until Apple began using Slack in 2019.

When employees were told to work from home at the beginning of the pandemic, Slack became particularly popular. “For a lot of us, this was the first chance to interact with people outside our own silo,” Ms. Parrish said. Previously, “none of us were aware that anybody else was going through this.”

The complaints seem to be making an impact. When Apple this year hired Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook manager, more than 2,000 employees signed a protest letter to management because of what they called “overtly racist and sexist remarks” in a book he had written, based in part on his time at Facebook. Within days, Apple fired him. Mr. García Martínez declined to comment on the specifics of his case.

In May, hundreds of employees signed a letter urging Apple to publicly support Palestinians during a recent conflict with Israel. And a corporate Slack channel that was set up to organize efforts to push Apple to be more flexible about remote-work arrangements once the pandemic ended now has about 7,500 employees on it.

Beyond the group activism, Apple is dealing with individual fights that are slipping into public view.

Ashley Gjovik, a former engineering program manager at Apple for six years, said she had complained to Apple for months about what she believed was inadequate testing for toxic chemicals at her office, as well as sexist comments from a manager.

After taking her complaints public this year, Ms. Gjovik was placed on leave and later fired. She said Apple had told her that she was fired for leaking product information and not cooperating with its investigation. She has filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department, she said.

Apple declined to comment on specific employees’ cases.

Ms. Dehus, who worked at Apple to mitigate the impact of mining valuable minerals in conflict zones, said she had left Apple after spending several years fighting a decision to reassign her to a role that she said had involved more work for less pay. She said Apple had begun trying to reassign her after she complained that the company’s work on the minerals was not, in some cases, leading to meaningful change in some war-torn countries.

Richard Dahan, who is deaf, said he had struggled at his former job at an Apple Store in Maryland for six years because his manager refused to provide a sign-language interpreter for him to communicate with customers, which federal law requires under some circumstances. He said that he had communicated with customers by typing on an iPad, and that some customers had refused to work with him as a result. When he told his manager, the manager said it was the customers’ right, he said.

“Would it be OK if they said they didn’t want to work with a person of color?” Mr. Dahan asked in an interview via a sign-language interpreter.

He was eventually assigned an interpreter. But by that time, he said, upper management viewed him as a complainer and refused to promote him.

“Their culture is: Drink our Kool-Aid, buy into what we’re telling you, and we’ll promote you,” he said. “But if you’re asking for anything or making noise, then they won’t.”

New York Times