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Apple employees threaten to quit as company takes hard line stance on remote work:
Apple employees claim the company is not budging on plans to institute a hybrid work model for corporate workers and is in some cases denying work-from-home exceptions, including one accommodation covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In June, Apple announced a hybrid work schedule that will see employees return to the office for three days a week starting in September, a shift toward normal corporate operations after the pandemic forced a lengthy work-from-home period. Days later, participants of what is assumed to be the same remote work advocacy Slack channel cited by The Verge asked more flexibility, saying that working from home brings a number of benefits including greater diversity and inclusion in retention and hiring, tearing down previously existing communication barriers, better work life balance, better integration of existing remote / location-flexible workers, and reduced spread of pathogens.
That request was flatly denied. In a video to employees late last month, SVP of retail and people Deirdre O'Brien toed the company line on remote work policies, saying, "We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future. If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person."
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday July 22 2021, @09:04PM
The trouble a large number of remote workers face is that the corporate people whose existence is justified by holding meetings are there alone in the office making these sort of decisions with no one to object. You know, because the potential objectors are all away from the office actually getting real work done.
You also have the risk of management with nothing else to do but manage by spreadsheet, the sort that look at numbers that say they can hire remote workers in a distant country that are way cheaper than the remote workers that could be commuting to the office. They don't care about loss of quality, productivity, etc. Their bonuses depend on the most recent quarter's numbers, not satisfied customers. They can bail out (possibly with a nice golden parachute) when things are about to crash, having milked their current position for all they could.