Inside A Culture Clash At Apple

them as special and different. This was the great talent of Apple's co founder and chief evangelists Steve Jobs, who somehow could make you feel cool and even a bit rebellious for buying a mass produced electronic device that a billion other people also have in their pocket. What we're about isn't making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well, we do that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple's about something more

than that. Apple at the core, it's core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That's what we believe, and even after all these years, people still line up at Apple stores around the world each time the company rolls out its latest version of the iPhone. The cue behind me looks pretty small at the moment, but it does spun all the way around. The corner is going to be at least a couple of hundred people have waiting for

the new devices. But a lot of these people out here waiting in chairs, are standing in line for hours in this heat, and let me tell you, it's a hot one out here. A lot of people really excited for the new phone. And for the first time since the pandemic, we're seeing these long lines we used to years ago. Those Apples store is and there are five twenty one of them now worldwide, have become the centerpiece

of the Apple customer experience. The stores are often impact with people who just want to hang out and soak up the Apple atmosphere. And few Apple fans are as genuinely enthusiastic about the company as those Apple store employees who come over to help you. They'll talk your ear off about the company and its values, and they seem to know every last detail about everything in the place. And if your phone breaks, the text at the store's genius bar can diagnose and often fix it on the spot.

It was just so cool the way that we trained our employees back then, it was just this experience where you felt very special. You felt very much like you were going to be able to come and work for a company and truly do the best work that you could, no matter what your role was. Even though it was still a retail job. I really felt like I was about to do some work that actually mattered and had

meaning behind it. When you come to the store, it's like we're there to help it, you know, meet you where you're at, and based on your interest, kind of match that. And then plus a little bit. Right, so if you're excited about getting a new phone, we're going to match that. But then the plus a little bit is showing you a few new features about the three different lenses on the cameras and how you can switch between them and something like that. I really found a

lot of a lot of joy through doing that. Those are two Apple Store employees, Liabrisco and Billie Jarbo. We'll hear more from them in a bit. Recently, some Apple Store employees like them have become frustrated. They say that company has changed. They're now doing what would have been unthinkable at Apple just a few years ago, pushing to unionize and maybe not for the reasons you'd think to explain what's happening. I'm joined by my colleague, josh Idolson.

He's a senior reporter covering labor and the workplace, and he's written a big story for Bloomberg Business Week about growing employee discontent at Apple. Josh, thanks for coming on

the show. Thanks for having me. Josh, you cover labor and workforce issues around the country, and you've been doing a lot of reporting on big companies like Amazon and Starbucks and what we're talking about today Apple and the story that you have recently written is really interesting because it's about Apple store employees feeling pressure to do something that Apple never had them do before, and that's to

up sell customers to buy stuff. One of the things that I learned traveling around the country talking to Apple workers is that there's a longer term shift at the Apple store that longtime employees have identified. Workers in various cities talk to me about the sense that the Apple store experience has changed for workers and in ways that

affect customers. On the one hand, because of understaffing, and on the other hand, the experience of the Apple store workers say has changed dramatically because of pressure to up sell, So Josh, it used to be when you go into the Apple Store, it was almost like an anti store. In fact, when the Apple Store is first open, people say, well, this is never gonna work because they have all the products out there and no one is actually trying to

get you to buy anything. You'd walk in there and you could play with the phones, and you could play with computers and talk to people who are really enthusiastic and really knowledgeable and walk right out of there without anyone asking you if you wanted to buy a thing, and that actually became one of the secrets to their success.

If something broke, you would go to the Genius Bar, where these people would fix it, and maybe they'd even fix it for free and kind of make it feel like they were doing you a special favor, and that all changed. You may know someone as I do, or you may be someone who traveling around the country around the world, you see an Apple store, you want to go in and hang out and see what it's like.

As one expert I've talked to said, the Apple Store is a store, but it's also partly a temple to go worship at the altar of the Apple brand and This was all part of Steve Jobs's idea that Apple was special, that it wasn't just a store selling stuff, that they were going to change the world. And people kind of laughed and said, Oh, that's Steve Jobs. He's over the top. But that vision of Apple as a special place with something a lot of employees took seriously

and kind of took to heart. One of the long term workers I talked to described how he and go workers used to say, I can't believe what a great Jobless is. We get to hang out and talk about how cool Apple products are all day, and that there was an encouragement to take your time with customers to try out cameras. That that focus has shifted and when

did that change? Why did that change? Apple has always had data, but people who have worked their long time say it used to be the data to that was really emphasized was the survey results about how happy the customers were. Now, workers say the focus has shifted towards well, how much money are we making off of these interactions? And workers say things started changing when Steve Jobs was replaced by Tim cook In, and that the change accelerated

under the current retail chief. Dear dree O'Brien. Workers say managers started spending more time in morning meetings emphasizing metrics like what the company calls ownership opportunities, which refers to when you come in as a customer with a device that you may want to get fixed, and you walk out having instead agreed to trade in the device and

pay some money to get a newer device. Some customers would be surprised, I think, to learn that there are stores where at all actually shows workers each other's statistics about what share of their customers traded in their device for a new one, and workers who have less impressive sales numbers that are below Apple's target in areas like getting people to trade in their product have those statistics marked in red in areas where their coworkers can all

see that as well. So they're being told to push Apple Care extended warranties. When you go to the Genius Bar and your phone is under fritz, instead of saying, oh, yeah, we can fix this, they say, here's how much it will cost you to buy a new phone. Or are they actually told you should try to get people to buy something new instead of fixing what they own. Workers say that the company now encourages them to focus on the opportunity to trade in the device for a new one.

One employee I talked to, for example, said he feels now like a car salesman, sometimes wishing for quote unquote solution that involves buying something new, even when he doesn't always feel like that's in the best interest of the customer. Josh, what if Apple employees told you about sort of their total experience about working for Apple now versus working for

Apple years ago. Some employees feel the jobs have become draining and that the pay and benefits, though they outstripped lots of other retailers, don't fully compensate them for the service that they're providing dealing with customers whose phones are as essential to limb as a limb. In some cases, workers have also expressed frustration with a gap they see between what the company promises and what it delivers when

it comes to listening and taking feedback. Let's hear again from le to Briscoe, an Apple store employee from Oklahoma City. The way that we were all kind of given work, we weren't distributed work fairly and evenly. There was a lot of poor communication, and I started to ask myself, how does one of the largest technology companies in the world that hires some of the brightest and best people in the world have so much dysfunction in terms of

communication and the way that we operate. And when you went to Apple and told them all of this, what did they say. Apple, in response to detailed inquiry, did not specifically address a number of the concerns that workers have raised. But Apple did say that it does not pay people based on commission, and then it does not mandate them to meet sales quotas. And it also said that it's committed like it always was to providing an

excellent experience for customers and for employees. And what employees tell you about how that makes them feel about the company in the direction it's heading. One of the workers I talked to said it's killed his spirit a bit. Workers at Apple who are trying to unionize in many cases see themselves as the protectors of the values that

the company is supposed to represent. There are people working across the country at Apple who feel like the company's official values deserve protecting and are not getting protected and advanced well enough by corporate management, who some of them referred to as big Apple, and that it's on the workers to push for the values that the company was supposed to stand for in the first place. After the break what some of these unhappy Apple workers are doing

about it? So, Josh, you described discontent among a lot of Apple store workers. What are they trying to do about it? Workers had Dozens of Apple stores around the United States now are discussing unionization, and two stores have voted to unionize. Apple is one of several flagship US companies where no one had unionized in the United States until the past year. Where a dam has been broken, Josh.

One of the stores where employees were really complaining about the culture of up selling that you described was in tows in Maryland. What happened there? In Towson, Maryland, workers talked about a giant laminated photo of a tree that management put in a break room where people who work on the Genius Bar were supposed to use a stick on label to mark each time they made a sale, and the tree, workers said made them feel that much more pressured on top of the existing pressure to have

perfect metrics. Workers said this tree frustrated them because it felt like that much more pressure to upsell customers and that much more, drifting away from the old focus on keeping customers happy. Towson is also a store where workers say their statistics were posted on the wall so that people could see who was getting more and who was

getting fewer. Customers to buy a new device rather than getting the old one fixed, and people with lower scores had their scores marked and read on this sheet that their co workers could all see. So they decided that they were going to try to unionize. And how did that all play out? Going up against a big company like Apple very difficult to do. How did they go

about it? Workers got in touch with a machinists union organizer last year, They moved slowly, deliberately built a union committee in secret, and once they were competent in their support, they went public and then after signing up about two thirds of the workforce, they filed for an election with the labor board. How did the company respond to the

unionization efforts? Did they? Did they combat it? Workers say the company tried hard to stop them from organizing and brought in managers from out of town, held meetings and suggested that unionizing could lead to losing pay or benefits, And workers say the campaign got personal. The company brought up the machinists unions history of racist behavior in the nineteenth century, that a manager who's black touched her own skin and told the workers that the union doesn't care

about us. How did the union drive affect the staff and was everyone going along with it or did it kind of drive a wedge between employees. In the end, in Tausen, about two thirds of the workers voted for the union. We've seen at a number of stores around the country some workers have been vocally opposed to the union, and some tactics that are pretty common in union organizing campaigns have been called out by anti union employees as they feel divisive. In Taoson, there's about a third of

the workforce who voted against the union. And one of the things that will determine the union's cloud as it tries to get a contract is how many of those workers it can win over to try to show a united front and taking on the company. Let's listen to what Billy Jarbo had to say. He's an Apple store employee in the Towson store, and that's when we really started to learn about Oh, there's a whole additional set

of rights, so no wonder they aren't. There's no accountability, you know, because we don't have those rights to back us up. It's like either I'm looking for a different job, or you know, we haven't tried this other way, so let's just try and see if we can negotiate a contract that's actually better. Josh. What did Apple say about

its responses to workers efforts to unionize? Apple did not respond directly to our questions about the union campaign or workers allegations about anti union pressure and messages that they've experienced from the company. Apple did say that it's proud of the exceptional benefits and compensation it offers. Apple says the benefits it offers range from mental health support, fertility assistance, to telehealth and virtual care tailored specifically fair black and

Latino staff. Another story that has unionized is in Oklahoma City. Was it a similar experience to what happened in housing, They're the actual signing up of two thirds of the workforce on cards happened within five days, so after deliberately building a committee, they were able to quickly sign up

their coworkers there too. In Oklahoma, the union alleges that the company was aggressive in bringing in more managers in holding meetings against the union, and some workers felt pretty condescended to by what happened in some of those meetings. How did employees make their argument to Apple and tell other employees about why they wanted to unionize? Was it this culture idea that they kind of wanted to go back to the Apple that they envisioned. Workers have adopted

some of the company's own branding. The website for the union in Oklahoma City features uh speech that Steve Jobs gave. There was a picnic that the Oklahoma City workers supporting the union and union organizers held in the lead up to the election where workers went around and each said

why they wanted a union. One of those workers said, because quote unquote good enough isn't And that's actually a line from Apple's credo, the mission statement, so to speak, that the company shares with workers, and a number of workers have said that they feel philosophically like what they're doing is what Apple encourages to push the status quo, to think differently and tactically. Some workers say they've adopted

strategies they learned at Apple. One of them talked about what union organizers would often call inoculation where you share with workers what the company his argument against the union will be ahead of time and prepare them with a response to it instead of an oculation. He calls this positioning early because that's the tactic that you use in the Apple store, with things like letting people know ahead of time that there might be a delay for their

repair so they're not caught off guard by it. Apple isn't the only big company feeling the anger of its employees. More with Josh Igelson after the break. Josh, You've written a lot about Apple, but there are also other big, well known companies have been writing about who are having a similar problem with employees who are having a loss

of faith in the company. Over the past year, we have seen some of the top flagship, long time union free companies in the United States have workers vote to unionize for the first time, and at a number of these companies we see workers framing what they're fighting for in the company's own language. Can you give some examples

of that At Starbucks? For example, Howard Schultz, who Starbucks calls its founder and is back for another stint as interim CEO, has talked repeatedly about having an empty chair at board meetings to represent the voice of the worker, And so the workers are saying, why does it have to be an empty chair, Why does it have to just be a symbol. Why don't we have a real

voice in governing the company? And by unionizing, they've gotten into collective bargaining negotiations where now they're proposing to Starbucks that it actually put a representative of workers in that chair. And as I've reported for Business Week, Starbucks lawyers were mounts was to say, haven't you ever heard of a metaphor? At Starbucks? At Trader Joe's, at r e I, at Apple?

You have companies that are known for a set of humane values and workers who now see themselves as fighting to protect and advance those values and to close the gap between what the company says it's ethos is and what they perceive as the actual conditions day to day working there. At some of these times gett In particular Starbucks, there has been much more widespread labor dissatisfaction and unionization efforts then we've seen at Apple what is happening at Starbucks.

At Starbucks a year ago, there were zero officially unionized Starbucks locations among the nine thousand corporate owned US Starbucks cafes. Now there's around two. And part of why so many executives are watching so closely what happens at a place like Apple is that we've already seen at Starbucks. Once workers get a foothold for collective bargaining, once union organizers get a beachhead at a company, things can spread very quickly.

At Starbucks, for example, the initial campaign in Buffalo moved deliberately and cautiously and was underground for the very first time. Starbucks has a US store that is union never before in the thirty year history since it went public until today. There are other places where workers organized much more quickly at other Starbucks cafes once they saw the example from Buffalo. I met with workers at a store in Memphis who were behind the register watching live streams of the ore

Bucks Buffalo union on their phones. One of them got in touch with the union by calling the landline at the Buffalo Starbucks location that had unionized and asking to talk to someone about how to organize. This question of unionization has gone for many workers from unthinkable to a question of why unionized, to a question of why not unionized? What is Starbucks said about workers complaints and they're pushed

to unionize the stores. Starbucks has said it believes they'll be better outcomes without collective bargaining, and it's repeatedly said that any claims of anti union activity by the company are categorically false. The General Council of the National Labor Relations Board, though, has issued dozens of pending complaints accusing the company of violating federal labor law. Starbucks has also said to me that it sees the union activism at the company as part of a larger trend in the

country that goes beyond Starbucks. And of course there's truth to let Josh, do you think companies are starting to change the way they think about how to respond when employees attempt to unionize. I talked recently to New York City Controller Brad Lander, who has spearheaded an effort to get a workers rights audit of Starbucks. He argues that there's a new norm emerging that if you're a progressive company, if you're a socially responsible company, even you should stay

neutral and not fight your workers efforts to unionize. That is not yet where most US companies are. It is still the norm in the US at most major companies, even at nonprofits, sometimes at unions, when their own staff try to organize, that management goes to lengths to prevent

workers from organizing. People tend to be hesitant to give up power if they have an alternative, and many executives, many managers believe with conviction that they are making decisions that's in everyone's best interest and that they'll be better able to do that without having to negotiate with anybody. That raises the big question, Josh, after all these efforts, if employees are able successfully to unionize, do things really change?

Do they get what they want? Does the come many change policies, or does it wind up just creating an

adversarial relationship and things goes out. We are at a point now an Amazon, at Chipotle, at Apple, at Starbucks, at Trader Joe's at r I where workers have unionized for the first time, but they don't yet have a collective bargaining agreement with the company, and on average, it takes more than a year to get a collective bargaining agreement after unionized, and if the company is worried that a good union contract would inspire more organizing elsewhere, and

the unions worried that a mediocre contract would hurt union organizing elsewhere. Then it can take even longer to get a contract, and many of these workers believe that ultimately getting a good contract is going to depend on additional pressure on the company, pressure from workers, pressure from consumers, pressure from politicians. In the meantime, workers do have some legal rights, but we are in a pivotal chapter now in these union fights. Where at Starbucks, for example, two

fifty or so stores have unionized, thousands haven't. And there are workers at some of these non union stores wondering and waiting and wanting to see will the workers unionized get a contract, will they make significant gains to change the industry that they're working in the way that textile workers or auto workers did in the past. Josh Idolson, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. You can read josh Idolson's business week feature about Apple

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