Because they're taking the tax savings from the irresponsible congressional actions and using that to enrich the wealthy rather than raising the pay of their workers by a non-trivial amount.
The rate workers are paid depends on the market for their skills and what retention the company wants. Worker pay will increase as the economy heats up and causes the labor pool to tighten.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple also compensated some high-value non-engineers in stock. To find the actual number of people who benefit, you would have to include them, plus you would have to add in all the people who don't work at Apple but own Apple stock directly or indirectly (for example, while I don't work at Apple, I probably own some stock because of my participation in a mutual fund).
I'm pretty certain that there are tens of thousands of people who see an increase in earnings because of Apple buybacks. The majority of them might be well-off since they are engineers or have the luxury of purchasing mutual funds, but I am hardly a millionaire or billionaire.
EDIT: Did more Googling; Apple's stock jumped around 12% after announcing their buyback, so the bonus is around 3%. I would love a $6000 bonus/year for the next few years. [0]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/05/12/what-impa... [0]
General consensus I've seen on Blind is that FANG engineers take in about half their wages in stocks, but that includes multiple years of RSU refreshers and appreciation.
But there's another way to think about it: buyback money isn't that much different than a dividend where people self-sort into who wants the money now versus later. Apple approved a 100B buyback program in May, and 4,915,138,000 shares outstanding. 20 bucks a share. Most offers I've seen on blind are around $100k of shares, so for AAPL at today's market close price that'd be $9300 dollars returned. Probably a bit more given they're at an all time high and the announcement was a few months prior.
So the 12 percent figure kinda makes sense: 10 percent or so of the shares announced to be retired via, and a 2 percent jump is explainable via typical earnings.
I doubt you'd find an engineer paid in RSUs who wanted to end buyback programs, but maybe one will pop up on HN and enlighten us.
These one time increases and whatever other bread crumbs that get handed out are sculpted to feel good at that moment, but pale in comparison to the truck that's going to hit them down the road when the completely unnecessary government budget deficit as a result of tax relief for the rich starts eating away bit by bit at the government and country. This isn't hyperbole. This is history repeating itself.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.0785%25+*+1+trillion+...
Apple has an Employee Stock Purchase Program, where you can automatically invest some percentage of your salary (I forget what) into Apple stock, which gets purchased on your behalf every few months at a discounted price. It's a pretty nice program and it means anyone who takes advantage of it (which really should be every employee who isn't living paycheck-to-paycheck) will benefit from an increase in the stock price.
Why is this undesirable? Simple. Lower and middle class workers drive the economy with their consumption. If they don't have stability, they don't spend. If they don't spend, the velocity of money through the economy decreases. You want workers to feel comfortable spending, and the only way to do that is by giving them stability along with a fair wage.
Social security, workplace safety, overtime ... all just magically appeared, correct?
Because maybe, again, just maybe, I'm being dense, but I don't think "skillsets" were ever a limiting factor for those who spearheaded unionization. "skillsets" are a facet of the bourgeoisie labor market, which I say as a firm capitalist. It's always been those at the bottom who have fought for worker's rights.
No. It took capitalism—more precisely, the resulting accumulation of human wealth and technology—for child labor to disappear. It disappeared when it became economically unnecessary for children to work:
http://atlanticsentinel.com/2011/01/did-government-end-child...
I am continually surprised by the number of people who seem to be under the impression that the default state of nature is one of abundance rather than scarcity. Why do you think children had to work in the first place?
It's possible it would be if it was more tax advantageous to pay workers then to pay out profits as buybacks through the most recent tax cuts. Clearly, taxes matter in corporate decision making, as large multinationals were keeping their cash offshore as long as possible, waiting for a tax holiday.