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Apple Retailer Facing Class Action Suit Over Employee Bag Checks
aitikin writes "Former Apple employees say the company requires workers to stand around without pay for up to 30 minutes a day while waiting for managers to search their bags for stolen merchandise."
The filing. It looks pretty illegal: mandatory unpaid checks of personal belongings before and after work and all breaks.
hiring people to work in your store who can't afford the product. Ford paid his workers well so they could afford his card. Apple store has to search it's workers to prevent theft. Maybe if they paid them better they wouldn't have to worry about this.
If Apple's actions are being described correctly, that's time that clearly belongs to be on the clock.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I never go to Apple stores.
Considering it is now legal to prohibit class actions in EULAs, it won't take long to put that into most job contracts. At least for Apple.
But then IANAL, so pardon my ignorance if EULAs are somehow less restrictive.
I don't care what they say about me, just make sure they spell my name right! - P.T. Barnum
:)
*Disclaimer* I may not be quoting directly/ correctly from memory
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
2/3rds of loss in retail is from employee theft. At a place like Apple outlets, where the products are small, expensive, and easily turned over for cash to friends or pawn shops, I'd imagine it's even higher. Not that this fact excuses forcing unpaid overtime on your workers, but I'm not surprised they're doing bag checks.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
No sympathy whatsoever.
As an airline pilot I do not get paid while I wait in line and am checked by the TSA. I do not get paid while I wait in line for customs. I do not get paid while I get the flight paperwork and verify it is safe and legal. I do not get paid while preparing and inspecting the airplane for flight. I do not get paid while I wait for everyone to get on the plane and coordinate with gate, ramp, fuel, maintenance and catering to ensure an on-time departure.
I think executions at the spot on styled iGallows controlled trough the cloud. Alternatively guillotine wiith an iPhone interface. Or just throw random people to the lions and put it on tv. The way justice system and state in general tend to work this little entertainment is the best we can hope for anyway.
In California, under state law it is very expensive for an employer to employ shenanigans like this. The fines can be quite large, the litigation can be quite expensive, and there is a potential for the employees to be paid wages while the issue is being resolved by the courts (at least as I understand the law). There is a reason why employers don't like California regulations, employees have the potential to grab the employer by the balls and twist and twist if the state EDD finds that the charges have merit.
Anyway, this case is just another example of just how evil Apple is as a company. It is unfortunate because I like its products (mostly) and I've owned several over the years.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
It's about that Apple "Experience"........
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I don't even see how such a thing is legal..
i think the whole point is that it is not legal
Depending on where the Apple store is relative to your home/other jobs/schooling, employees might not relish the thought of going all the way to work and back every day with nothing but the contents of their pockets and wearing their work outfit.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I don't think they should be searching or banning the bags, but it would've been easier from their standpoint to just ban them. Their policy exposes them to unneeded legal risk.
As an airline pilot, you've (well, your union, on your behalf) negotiated a contract with the airline where your pay is based on getting the plane where it needs to go, and you are paid for all activities necessary to accomplish the task for which you are paid for.
Also known as, AIRLINE PILOTS ARE NOT HOURLY EMPLOYEES.
I am sure that, once you add up all the time you spend on all of your job-related activities, your wage + time and a half for hours over 40 per week, greatly exceeds the minimum wage.
Just like every other salaried employee who doesn't make any more money when it's crunch time and you have to pull 10-12 hour days to get shit done. It's called a job description, and being paid for the job (get plane from A to B) instead of the time (you were in airports/planes from 9 AM to 8 PM.)
If you don't like the terms of your contract, either renegotiate it so you are paid by the hour instead of by the trip (or flight hour), or work somewhere else. I hear Apple stores are hiring.
Note that Apple stores probably don't have benefits like medical, dental, or free flights on any domestic carrier on a space-available basis, and your hourly wage will plummet vs. your flight-hour wage, but at least you'll get a slight increase on your paycheck if customs takes a little longer to clear!
paintball
I don't think they should be searching or banning the bags, but it would've been easier from their standpoint to just ban them. Their policy exposes them to unneeded legal risk.
the policy is so that the "managers" can feel like bigshots. it's not about easy. that's why they went along with it despite it being illegal.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Depending on where the Apple store is relative to your home/other jobs/schooling, employees might not relish the thought of going all the way to work and back every day with nothing but the contents of their pockets and wearing their work outfit.
They don't need to ban bringing the bag to work, just ban bringing it into the inventory control area. They could provide a locker room where people can lock up their bag before their shift, outside the inventory control point (the place where they were inspecting the bags). This is common practice at plenty of retailers, warehouses, and manufacturers. Try this: Go to Walmart and walk around. Okay, now how many employees do you see walking around the store with backpacks, purses etc? Answer: zero. They are in the locker room.
Surely if you're going to steal something, you'd do it on company time.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
When I worked at Tandy Computers in the late 80's at their manufacturing facility as a motherboard repair technician, they had a similar system to check employees as they left the facility. However, I recall that the time clock was AFTER the checkpoint, so you were being paid while standing in the queue waiting to be checked. This could take 10-20 minutes each shift, depending on how quickly you got to the queue. Most of the workers were relatively low pay, hourly production line workers.
I do think the way Apple stores are handling this is very unfair to employees. You cannot expect that employees come to work without any personal belongings at all, so banning bags is not an option. But, they should be paid while waiting for these checks. They could provide lockers in a secure area outside the "sales area" where employees leave their personal items while at work, and they do not have casual access to these lockers while working.
At the West Hollywood Best Buy I saw employees being visually inspected by a manager as they exited the store single file after closing. At a Culver City Best Buy one of the employees told me they get searched. I didn't believe him until I saw it being done at another location. Pretty humiliating. Hopefully the kids who work there now realize this is not the type of job you want to do long term.
You can't put cameras under peoples shirts. Well you could but you'd get in even bigger trouble.
wow, you're like the anti-fanboy. Same as a fanboy, but negative.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Jan Wong
There were many social issues discussed in this series of articles, the majority of which I didn't agree with as framed. One issue she pointed out was that these barely-literate low-income scullery-scrubs few of whom had driver's licences were expected to haul vacuum cleaners through the Toronto metro system between jobs that were not as proximal as a modern UPS delivery route.
Brown Down: UPS Drivers Vs. The UPS Algorithm
No, the scheduling algorithm employed by the scullery-scrub dispatch office involved chewing up small bits of paper and spitting them at a map, because they were getting away with NOT PAYING for the delivery of vacuum cleaners by their downtrodden and raw-fingered cleaning staff. Many of these barely-solvent workers were putting in eight hour on job sites, plus another four hours (unpaid) moving between job sites, toting equipment that wasn't even their own for less than the cost of delivering the equipment by any other business method.
Jan Wong could have gone to war over a clear violation of labour fairness, but she instead decided to do a lot of public hang-wringing over systemic issues unlikely to ever change.
It's Apple's job to politely inform their store managers that this violates accepted labour practice and to put an end to it as thoroughly as they do with unwelcome rumours about unfinished products.
I once spoke to an ex IBM employee in the early 1980s who said he left IBM because he could get anything done. His department was under such tight security that it took him an hour to get to his desk in the morning and another hour to leave it in the afternoon. I think part of that was fetching his work product from a secure area and returning it there again with an inspection. He was well paid for the whole ordeal, until it finally drove him nuts.
The rule in a democratic salary market is that time is money. Even if the money is too small to spit at from the perspective of the person writing the cheques.
An anecdote I liked from that series was the incident(s) where business owners tried to bully her out of using street parking in front of their stores (which they would prefer to see used by customers) on the presumption that she was timid and uneducated. It almost blew her cover confessing she knew how to drive in the hiring interview. I think she had to tell some huge sob story to make her desperation believable to take such a job as a person who could hold down a driver's licence.
So... do you install crApps on your iPhoney?
Tomorrow is another day...
This is just a story about 2 stores, and my guess is that it's about paranoid managers who have lost stock in the past. No news here.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Try this: Go to Walmart and walk around. Okay, now how many employees do you see walking around the store with backpacks, purses etc? Answer: zero. They are in the locker room.
Nice try. The Wal-Mart employees generally have to walk through the entire store to the back to clock in. The area where the receiving docks are is where the break room and employee lockers are. Yes, they keep their purses/backpacks/lunchboxes in a locker while working, but they could also slip things into these bags in the store while on their way back, or take merchandise from the storage racks in back area by the receiving docks, then walk out at the end of the day with their bags on arm.
For your idea to work the store has to have a separate employee entrance/exit outside the inventory control area. And you'll need someone to guard the door between the inventory control area and the employee area to make sure bags or merchandise to not cross between the two.
Why don't they just ban the bags from the stores in the first place?
Because 90% of women carry purses. Most women's clothing don't have usable pockets, so they need the purses. A ban would unfairly affect women more than men, and would result in another lawsuit.
Also, if the store has any kind of dress code or uniforms, there's a good chance that many of the employees bring a change of clothes with them so they don't have to go straight home after work to change (and, to a lesser degree, go straight to work from home in the morning). Bringing your change of clothes in a bag is both vastly more convenient, and also required to protect said clothes from any bad weather.
It seems as though Apple has more security and protections on preventing stuff from being taken by employees than the NSA.
Up to 30 minutes, actually, and it is unpaid time - despite them actually working.
Was that too difficult to understand?
"What we're doing here will send a giant ripple through the universe."
-- Steve Jobs
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So we're not exactly comparing apples to apples here
I see what you did there.
Look at the YMCA personal trainers, ask them about their "mandatory" volunteering they do each week
.
"But isn't the YMCA a charity you ask?" Why yes and no. The YMCA that gives aid to the homeless and such sure but the gym portion is a whoooole different entity.
I knew an accountant who used to audit them and trust me they knew how to work the system and what was right and what was wrong.
You have a strange definition of plummeting!
Apple is doing fine. It's iPhone are selling more than they were in the comparable period last year. iPod revenues are down but that is to be expected, and not surprising at all. iPad sales are down, and also to be expected. The same quarter last year saw the introduction of a brand new iPad.
Mac sales are slightly down ($300m or so) which is much better than other PC makers are managing.
So given that Apple hasn't really had any new products now for the best part of 9 months, I think they are doing fine
Want to see trouble, look at Dell, HP, HTC and Nokia.
And there is nothing more ironic than claiming that Apple is not newsworthy in the comments on an article containing news about Apple.
if any of us complain about the abusive, slave-like working conditions, they threaten to send us to work in an Apple store.
(Disclaimer: This is a joke. I do not work at Foxconn.
Yeah, they're a bunch of i Phonies and one-trick i Ponies ... fallen from grace for taking a byte from the big apple
Because 90% of women carry purses. Most women's clothing don't have usable pockets, so they need the purses. A ban would unfairly affect women more than men, and would result in another lawsuit.
Most womens' clothing that is sensible to wear at work has enough pocket space to hold a small key for a locker, and even if it doesn't, most women are smart enough to remember a combination to a lock that they use every day.
There's a very easy solution to the problem, which has been suggested higher up the thread. :)
Shut up you ignorant lying moron.
sales are plummeting
It's seen a _small_ sales dip in _some_ categories but nothing close to "plummeting". And if you dare quote the iPad numbers, you will betray how daft you are. It's a channel adjustment - the actual sell through numbers only dropped 3% which is _EASILY_ attributable to people knowing a new iPad is on the horizon and choosing to wait before buying and if you consider a 3% dip "plummeting" then you are a moron.
paying literally zero tax
Apple paid more corporate taxes than ANY OTHER AMERICAN COMPANY! Now, I don't know what your definition of "literally zero" is but when they paid more than anyone else, that would suggest they did not, in fact, pay "literally zero". Unless every other corporation got money back, Apple did not LITERALLY pay ZERO taxes.
I'm not going to pick apart any more of your post because you're a lying moron and not worth my time. Anyone who claims Apple is paying "literally zero tax" is flat out a liar.
How does ignorant lying bullshit like this get modded up?
Feel free to flame; feel free to mod me troll, but I'm sick of flat out bullshit ignorant posts like this being modded "Informative". I've been coming to Slashdot for many years to learn new things about tech and geek subjects but this is getting pathetic. Hate Apple, if you want, but at least base it vaguely on facts rather than complete and total bullshit lies.
Apple's problem is that they have become the old people's brand. Middle aged folks who are having a mid-life crisis so want something cool but are not tech savvy so buy the one that is simple to use. The younger people want something they can customize beyond changing the wallpaper and do cool stuff with.
Apple's rivals have been pushing this angle a lot lately, especially Samsung. It's a problem because every middle-aged guy on the TV seems to have one and they all love to proudly wave it around and show off the apps they found.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I've been coming to Slashdot for many years to learn new things about tech and geek subjects but this is getting pathetic. Hate Apple, if you want, but at least base it vaguely on facts rather than complete and total bullshit lies.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2013/may/29/apples-dirty-little-tax-secret-video
This is my favourite video, to explain to you what is happening. Apple don't even use a tax haven :). In effect in America the taxman charges tax where a company is incorporated, Ireland charges a comapny where the company is managed. Apple tells the American taxman the company is incorporated in Ireland...and tells the Irish taxman Apple is managed in America. The senator proceeding over Apple said apple discovered "The holy grail of tax avoidance". They pay literally zero tax on those profits.
If their was a history of internal theft at these two stores than it is a non-issue. then again Apple should not make their products so expensive that their own underpaid employees cannot afford them. The overcharging-VZW store that I use at least gives their workers any phone while employed there. Manager said it is good advertising.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I mean, do you really need to take your backpack with you on lunch, or even bring one at all, if you worked somewhere with this stupid policy. Take the sandwich out of the bag unless they think you will steal an iPhone between two slices of bread.
The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Dubious Officer of Unpaid Checking and Harassment Executive - Bags
I don't know about ol' Henry Ford, but my uncle worked at a GM plant in Fremont back in the '60s, when no one dared drive a Ford into the employee lot. Things were changing by the '70s, but the first guys to buy imported economy cars got vandalised pretty hard.
BTW, I'd always heard that Ford paid well to prevent the Labor Unions from getting their foot in the door.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
"Apple is not newsworthy" -- the one accurate part of your post.
Yes, Apple is an abusive employer. Oh, wait, you mean those Chinese companies that produce parts for Asus, etc., are abusive. Wrong you are.
Apple's profits are down and they are plummeting. Oh, wait, you mean that was just a dip and they really do make things beside the iPhone. Wow, wrong again.
But you *are* right that Apple is not newsworthy. But for some reason everytime a journalist wants to popularize a negative tech article they write it up in a way that pushes Apple. Still, you're right. They aren't newsworthy, its just they get page hits.
I used to work for a smaller semiconductor fab. The site itself was considered a foreign trade zone, which meant you were subject to search entering and leaving the building. It doesn't matter if you were paid or not, you were subject to search.
Back in the day I had a roommate that worked at a Baskin Robins that was breaking all kinds of employment rules. For example they were paid minimum wage but if the cash in the drawer didn't match up to what he thought it should, he'd take it out of their pay. Well employment law was the only thing he was breaking, I called the corporate office and it turned out that they had a rule that you had to pay more than minimum wage anyhow. You find that with chains sometimes, they have internal wage rules higher than the legal minimum.
However he got away with it forever because none of his employees (including my roommate) would turn him in. I tried to convince her to, to let the corporate office and the state attorney know, but she wouldn't.
scribd sucks ... no need to force people to be tracked
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...and you're going to transport the contents of that locker to/from the store in a... ?
Right, a bag. Or possibly a loose bundle of laundry, which might duck the letter of the bag-check policy but would be capable of concealing an iPod and probably end up being searched anyway.
0 1 - just my two bits
While Apple makes a fuckton of profit, retail is normally very low margin. For example Target's profit margin is about 3.8%, and 3-4% is normally where it is around. That means that after you account all costs, the products, loss to theft, the stores, employees, taxes, etc, etc, etc there's 3-4% left over. That's fairly thin. Same deal with Safeway, about 1.2% currently. That means in those cases they actually can't increase operating costs much more before they'd slip in to unprofitability.
That is not to try and give companies a pass at being bad to employees but let's be a little realistic here. Retail is, in nearly all cases, a very thin profit margin. It isn't like they can just afford to massively increase costs, and not raise prices, because there is just not the extra to do that.
The actual law in this case is very very very CLEAR if you are required to be there you are required to be PAID
FULL STOP
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Why would this practice have gone on long enough to create a class action suit? It's illegal, plain and simple. Since no employer/employee contract can override the law, so regardless of what a person supposedly agreed to participate in when they were hired, if they ever actually come out and say that the person isn't allowed to leave after their paid period has ended until they've been checked, it's just one simple call to the employment standards office afterwards to file a formal complaint. After they've been investigated for the practice, it's a fairly safe bet they won't be doing it again. If they need to inspect people before they leave, then any extra time that it takes them to take care of that had better be paid
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
More specifically, you can sue your employer for doing something that is against the law... which in this case would be not paying you for time that they are demanding from you as condition for employment. No employer/employee agreement can overrule what is actually permitted by law.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I jumped on with Apple Retail in early 2008. As it stands, Apple Retail has one of the better compensation packages for both fulltime and parttime employees. Medical/Dental/Vision, Stock Options, Paid Vacation, Etc. Before Steve Jobs left the company for the last time, he mandated that EVERY Apple Employee be eligible for Health Insurance. More recently, Tim Cook re-adjusted all of the pay compensations nationwide to be more in line with the higher paying/higher cost of living regions (NYC/LA/SF). That said, employees were discouraged from bringing bags into work. However, when bag checks were nessesary the managers at my store would do them WHILE you were clocking out. But that may vary store by store, as a result of this suit though, I imagine that Retail Chain Management will mandate that bag checks be done before or at clock-out, not after. So, benefits, awesome. Pay, not bad. Stock options, yes. BTW, the managers check each other's bags.
If the employee must be on site, then they must be paid. The law is very clear on this point. Personally, I think it's appalling that it ever got as far as a class action suit, when a simple call to the regional employment standards office to file a formal complaint would have resolved the situation relatively quickly, and without any court costs.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Well, like men, women are supposedly adult human beings.. they could just deal. It sure beats having their bags searched like they're prisoner-slaves (oh wait, they're apple employees maybe they're used to it). I only meant that from Apple's perspective, it's legally safer to just ban the bags than it is to search. Even in today's broken PC culture, I highly doubt telling a woman not to bring her bags into the building would result in a winnable case.
And how long was it before they got in shit for this?
Because unless those tellers who are forced to remain after their shift has ended are on salary, requiring that an employee stay on premises and not paying them for their time is illegal in every province in Canada.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Apple trusts their own employee's less than it trusts its consumers.
I disagree. Apple can't DRM their own employees.
DRM isn't trust.
Everyone knows to get the stuff out the door you hide it in the boxes of trash and pick it up after work. I knew a guy who knew a guy that worked at BestBuy and had a very lucrative side business.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
What locker room? When I worked there a long time ago, there was just an area you could put your bags, and you had to hope nobody would steal your stuff.