Apple employees responded to the company’s request that they return to work at least three days per week starting in the month of January by starting a petition that claims the policy is overly severe and undermines their successful transition to remote work during the epidemic.
The petition was created in reaction to chief executive Tim Cook’s all-employee message, which said last week that employees will need to come into the office for at least three days a week beginning in early September.
Employees are now fighting to keep their flexible work arrangements that allow them to work from home because it makes them “happier and more productive.”
Due to a spike in COVID cases in California, the business earlier abandoned a similar plan to reinstate employees to its Cupertino workplace three days per week.
All of Apple’s 36,000 employees are now permitted to work remotely, a practise that Cook, 61, has been attempting to change for the last several months.
Last Monday, the firm re-started such initiatives by informing employees that, beginning on September 5, they would need to report to work in person at least three days a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a third day to be decided by staff.
Needless to say, the notification raised some eyebrows among the Silicon Valley institution’s personnel, and on Monday, a group of workers identifying as “Apple Together” launched a petition pushing for the policy to be scrapped.
A proposal allowing staff to “work directly with our immediate boss to find out what type of flexible work arrangements are ideal for each of us and for Apple” is one of the requests included in the petition.
With 232 signatures thus far, the petition push puts pressure on the iPhone manufacturer as the date for the policy’s intended launch draws near.
Are you an Apple employee who works in an office?’ starts the nightly call to action. Are you not too happy with the RTO mandate? Sign the petition to show support for the cause.
“For the last two and a half years, Apple’s previously office-based workers have produced excellent work, flexibly, both outside and within typical office locations,” the statement says.
The week of September 5 (Labor Day) is when everyone must return to work, according to a recent announcement from Apple leadership.
The petition claims that “this universal command from top leadership does not reflect the particular requirements of each professional function nor the variety of persons.”
Many compelling reasons and conditions, including “disabilities (visible or not); family care; safety, health, and environmental issues; financial considerations; to just plain being happier and more productive,” were cited by the organisers as reasons to keep working remotely.
As of early Monday, it was unclear how many of the petition’s signatories belonged to confirmed Apple employees, the only identities that would be relevant to the group’s attempts to alter Cook’s internal policy.
A Monday request for comment from Apple Together, which describes itself as a worldwide solidarity union made up of employees from throughout the corporation, was not immediately returned.
Apple, on the other hand, has not yet responded to the growing criticism of its recently stated policy.
As COVID cases get less complicated, the business joins a number of technology and financial firms in demanding a return to office.
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, told staff members to come back to work or quit the organisation earlier in June.
Apple started requiring employees to work one day a week on April 11; on May 2, this obligation was increased to two days.
All employees were supposed to report to their workstations by May 23; however, that directive was abandoned in June.
67 percent of Apple employees polled between April 13 and April 19 said they disagreed with the return-to-office rule, according to Fortune.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, who took over the company in 2011 following the passing of longtime boss Steve Jobs, has been adamant about his employees’ return to work for the better part of a year. Cook maintains that a hardware-focused company like Apple needs its employees to be physically present in the office to design its physical products.
He wrote to the workers in early March, telling them to be ready to come back.
According to Bloomberg, Cook said in the email, “In the next weeks and months, we have a chance to combine the best of what we have learned about working remotely with the irreplaceable advantages of in-person collaboration.”
But many workers argue that they can do the task just as well from home and that they don’t want to compromise their ability to balance work and life.
An unidentified former Apple employee told Bloomberg in April, “Everything occurred with us working from home all day, and now we have to go back to the office, wait in traffic for two hours, and pay someone to look after kids at home.” The benefits of working from home are endless. Why on earth would we want to return?
Employees have also been quick to point out that while spending their days inventing technologies that allow people all around the globe to work from home, they still have to go back to the office.
“We tell everyone who uses our products how amazing they are for remote work, but we ourselves are unable to utilise them to work remotely?” More than 1,050 Apple workers signed an open letter that was published.
How on earth can we expect our clients to take it seriously? If we don’t experience remote work ourselves, how can we possibly know what issues need to be addressed in our products?