What It’s Like to Work Inside Apple’s ‘Black Site’

If big tech companies want to own up to being heartless mercenary capitalists who will wring every drop of sweat out of workers and spit them out as burned-out husks with no savings at the age of 35, hey, that's the system we live in. But something seems off when they want to have their cake and eat it too– that is, they want to seem like inspiring, human-friendly forces for good, but quietly use the glow from that reputation to get away with subcontracting away a huge amount of their labor to people working in miserable conditions. There's a reason that some labels moved away from sweatshop labor: it's bad press. If Apple is going to effectively use sweatshop labor (through a contractor, whatever) they should have to eat the bad press. Don't defend it as just the contractor's fault. It's literally the exact same situation as a clothing sweatshop.

Not just as a subcontractor. I used to work for a very large company, and it was just as bad as a full-time employee (and even worse for contractors!). Both of these statements applied there:

> One described the workplace as depressing and quiet, with everyone on edge.

> “There were many people who took initiative and made things, increased the efficiency. They weren’t rewarded in any way,” he says. “There were people who had abandoned any hope. They’d come in late, leave early, and just do nothing all day. They were treated the same as everyone else.”

It was absolutely horrible, and I will never let a firm get inside my head like that again.

I'm not quite sure why these stories keep coming up, given the vast amount of literature available describing why and how contracting, with it's bifurcated pay and benefits systems, can and is mutually beneficial to the organizations.

In fact the #1 thread, as of this writing, is about freelancing and has dozens of comments from freelancers.

One possible explanation for the frequency of the topic, is that it's not the structure of contracting that people are rejecting, but rather the wide disparity between the size, pay and benefits of the contractor vs the contractee. Nobody complains if Bain takes a contract with Apple, as both have good pay and benefits. Similarly nobody complains about the freelancer working for [megacorp] because the freelancer is independent and an owner. However, increase the wealth gap between the companies and now you have a story.

The article very explicitly uses terminology to imply that the report is about an intelligence community black site. The article says this explicitly:

> Workers say managers instructed them to walk several blocks away before calling for a ride home. Several people who worked here say it’s widely referred to within Apple as a “black site,” as in a covert ops facility.

It says it is widely referred to within Apple as a covert ops facility. (It doesn't say jokingly referred to that way.) In addition it uses the word back door in the second paragraph, which is really evocative. It says:

>From the outside, there appears to be a reception area, but it’s unstaffed, which makes sense given that people working in this satellite office—mostly employees of Apple contractors working on Apple Maps—use the back door.

An editor who didn't want to evoke this would change it to secondary entrance, or simply, "don't use the main entrance". They wouldn't use the term back door. Bloomberg isn't some tabloid.

For better or for worse, people are missing that the article calls this a "covert ops facility" (using those exact 3 words) similar to room "Room 641A" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Finally, the suggestion to walk several blocks before hailing a ride doesn't make sense in any normal employee context. The article is calling this an intelligence community site, says so very explicitly, and puts that term in the title.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site

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NOTE: I got mod approval to post this response, since I am doing so from a throwaway, but not to break the site guidelines.

Sadly, the entire point is that they are not employees, let alone second class ones. In the end, it boils down to the perennial question of how much of your work is done by employees and how much by vendors. And it always leads to awkward situations. (Quite a few of those when I was an employee at Google and something I don't see as much anymore, luckily.)

Turns out this wasn't allowed by building codes, but I wouldn't be surprised if somehow this "spirit" made it's way to Apple as well.

Although I've had the same problem in every male dominated tech company office I've worked in. A few years back Amazon had to have people work from home because there weren't enough bathrooms in their office.

Interestingly enough, that's one of my biggest complaint working @ Bloomberg.

Well, this is from Bloomberg. It's about what I expect these days.

To not appear too numerous every day at 5pm right outside the office entrance and draw suspicions as to what is in there?

My least favorite job was at an investment bank where men outnumbered women 100:1. Urinals were always clogged with garbage, toilets were left unflushed, and sinks regularly filled up with human waste.

(Hiring approximately equal numbers of male and female employees would also fix it, but that's a difficult hiring and pipeline problem, and gender-neutral bathrooms are created by new signage.)

It's not uncommon to have more work in a given area than you have employees to do that work. So, you hire contractors to fill in.

But are contractors allowed to do all the things that employees can do? If not, then you've just created a whole new series of problems for yourself.

Been there, done that. On both sides of the fence, multiple times.

The worst was when I was a government civilian, working in the Pentagon, and I had a security clearance. The badges made it very clear who had what level of security clearance, and that governed where they could go and what they could do.

But at least the US Government had a pretty good reason for the way they treated people in that way.