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Comment by blintz | Hacker News Reader

Does it strike anyone else as absurd that a $2 trillion company has spent 5 years and untold millions arguing over whether it must compensate employees for the 15 minutes it takes for a company-mandated frisk?

In fact, Apple lawyers argued before the California Supreme Court that the time was not mandated since employees could waltz just opt to ‘not bring things with them’. How insane is that - the search is not technically ‘required’ since people don’t technically ‘need’ to bring things with them when they come to work? Who doesn’t need to bring a purse/phone/backpack to work?

The whole thing feels straight out of some alternative (dystopian?) future America like Infinite Jest.

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>Does it strike anyone else as absurd that a $2 trillion company has spent 5 years and untold millions arguing over whether it must compensate employees for the 15 minutes it takes for a company-mandated frisk?

As an Amazon employee, no, it does not.

It's almost like the big corps are in collusion to keep wages down, whether they employ tons of low-wager workers or only a few.

We all know it is about motivation, money and economies of scale.

Motivation - make money for rentiers, otherwise get sued.

Economies of scale - many low paid employees means differences in how you treat them can add up to millions.

Result - employ people to reduce those millions in costs.

Don't blame the man, blame the game.

When the referee blows their whistle, the individual player who transgressed against the rules or spirit of the game is individually punished, and collectively all players benefit from this, even the one penalized. That the one penalized may not agree with or comply with the referee is beyond the scope of accountability of one referee’s ability to enforce the rules of the game.

But Apple's economies of scale are in east Asian factories, no Apple stores.

Maybe they got to $2 trillion because of worker-unfriendly policies like this one.

Perhaps you are underestimating the amount of theft by employees, and the fact that hiring more security or paying for 15 mins of waiting time to each employee would cost even more.

More than what? The cost of the court case? Because that would be a gamble at best, and one they lost. Now they're paying the time and the court costs.

You don’t get to 2T by paying more than you can.

Neither do you get there by being a bottom-feeding barrel scraper. (Well you might, but that's not how Apple did it.)

On the merits the retail employees seem obviously in the right: once you've clocked out you should be free to leave. If corporate wants to impose some extra hassle, they get to do that, but you get paid for your time.

But more importantly, the Apple retail stores are legitimately awesome. The checkout experience is amazing. The genius bars are the best tech support I've ever had. Something is working really well here! Why squeeze the golden goose?

Apple should take a cue from other beloved retailers (Costco and Trader Joe's come to mind) and make their stores coveted employers for those seeking retail work. Just fucking treat your employees well, they'll return the favor.

It's not surprising once we realize that the $2T company is just a bunch of people with different priorities. A major shareholder of Apple can't be bothered to know about this minor issue, but for those lawyers it was a career making event.

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