Apple owes $2M for not giving workers meal breaks | Hacker News Reader

Apple owes $2M for not giving workers meal breaks

money.cnn.com

44 pointsbrakmic20 comments

"The complaint says Apple's culture of secrecy keeps employees from talking about the company's poor working conditions. 'If [employees] so much as discuss the various labor policies, they run the risk of being fired, sued or disciplined,' the complaint reads."

Retaliation against employees discussing work conditions or trying to organize a union is a violation of federal labor laws. So Apple isn't just violating California laws here.

> The complaint says Apple's culture of secrecy keeps employees from talking about the company's poor working conditions. "If [employees] so much as discuss the various labor policies, they run the risk of being fired, sued or disciplined," the complaint reads.

Does anyone have a copy of the complaint? I'd love to read some of these lawsuits against employees and see how much Apple gets from suing retail employees. (My guess is that they've never done this, but hey, I'm willing to be surprised.)

There has been a wave of these class action lawsuits in California, and employers have been forced to take a more literal interpretation of lunch breaks and other breaks for hourly workers. Across a large organization, you can't handle break time informally any more ("just catch a break when things slow down") because, unless breaks are more rigorously enforced, some hourly worker will file a class action suit that will pull in every hourly worker at the employer. This applies whether it's a sweatshop or business support staff at a tech employer.

This has had all kinds of effects, some salutary, and many just annoying. For instance, very junior tech staff (who are hourly workers) are paid for airplane travel outside of work hours, while salaried staff are not. Promotions from hourly to salaried now involve considerably more regulation.

Without knowing more about the specific practices, we can't say if Apple was just a part of that wave, or if there was some actual exploitation going on. Given that the article has several click baity hooks, and no specific facts about labor exploitation, I'm doubtful there is a major problem here.

At the last company I worked at, one of the first things they told us was,"you must take these certain breaks at approximately certain times in the day". The timing didn't have to be exact, but this approach allowed people to take breaks in a more informal manner(they could adjust an hour or so in either direction), but kept compliance with regulations. I think this approach allows the employers to be somewhat informal about breaks, without opening themselves to lawsuits.

If large multinational companies like this are violating employment law I can't even imagine what smaller companies are doing.

Probably not violating laws because they dont have the money to pay for lawyers and politicians

Probably even doing worse because they don't have the money to pay for lawyers nor competent HR if they even have that.

This isn't exactly a high bar we are talking about here.

The timings of legally required breaks is the kind of thing you put on a one page summary that you give to anyone doing management of people that get those breaks.

Legally required breaks are the low hanging fruit of labor disputes. A lot of small businesses really fuck it up by: misclassification of exempt employees, 1099 vs W-2 employees, overtime, inadequate safety equipment, inadequate safety training.

Granted, some of these are because the SMB owner was simply uninformed, like OSHA violations. Overtime is quite malicious though ie. you work 60 hours this week, and 20 hours next week, manager moves that 20 hours OT onto next week, thus denying you overtime.

Probably not.

How much did Apple profit from denying lunch breaks to employees. I'll bet it was more than $2 million.

The system is rigged, if you're big enough, even when you lose you win.

I would assume this is store by store. I doubt apple coorperate said "hey! Those weak retail workers dont deserve lunch breaks!". However, there may be a culture that exists to support it.

That money is nothing. It's not just about the lost hours, I believe just because of the lunch breaks Apple would have had to hire and train more people

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Apple owes a hell of a lot more than that for not bothering to police fake reviews on the app store.

The crazy thing about this is that instead they could have lost less than $2M (assuming that the charges are punitive) to just let people take a break. That's not even pocket change to apple. That's take-a-penny money to apple, and the workers would've been happier and able to eat

Is it? $95 per employee is probably roughly 10 hours unpaid. An employee would rack that up working there 1 hour every two days or every 20 days. This was maintained across 5 years.

Apple still comes out ahead.

Until fines are significantly more expensive (factor of 100+) than compliance, this will continue.

I can't imagine Apple did this deliberately. Most large companies are aware that the PR costs of such mistakes are higher that the costs and would never deliberately try to screw over workers. It was probably an oversight by one/some of its managers or vendors. Spend enough time auditing any Fortune 500 company's worker policies at a plant, warehouse or retail store and I'm sure you'll find similar examples. Like the recent 60minutes covered 'Google driveby lawsuits against stores'.

"It was probably an oversight by one/some of its managers or vendors."

The class action included 21,000 employees - that's more than just a couple of Apple stores, so lots of managers were involved.

And what "vendors"? Apple stores are owned by Apple and their workers are employees of Apple.

> I can't imagine Apple did this deliberately.

Somebody decided to do this deliberately. These are well-known rules in the retail sector.

And even if they didn't do it deliberately, this still did material harm to people.

One can still do harm even if you didn't mean to. And you can still be convicted of a crime for it.

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