Apple keeps shutting down employee-run surveys on pay equity | Hacker News Reader

Apple keeps shutting down employee-run surveys on pay equity

theverge.com

68 pointsrimunroe9 comments

It seems like the common element here is that they’re using company resources to send out non-company surveys.

Can be easily solved by just hosting a surveymonkey or Google form and using that to collect info.

I went through union training and we had lots of material on how we can’t use company supplies for union tasks. And the example is we can’t use company paper to print brochures and stuff. So this seems the equivalent of using company Box/whatever to host the material.

> And the example is we can’t use company paper to print brochures and stuff.

Communication tools in digital and remote work have become the equivalent of the office environment, so it feels like the same freedom of expressions for union organization should be allowed on them.

Was the spirit of the guideline you're referring to in order to avoid union activies as appearing as if they were company-branded? Or something else?

I think the issue was using company resources for union activities. So using company paper would be a misuse of funds or whatever. This was about existing unions so was calling out that union funds should pay for union expenses.

What possible upside is there to the company or its employees from letting these surveys run? Conducting statistically meaningful surveys is a complex discipline that requires an expert's training. The only thing these naive surveys can lead to is accusations and grievances.

It can lead to employees having a say in how the company is run. Of course this is terrible for management, if the management does not trust or reward employees fairly.

This activity is arguably protected by federal law.

https://medium.com/@teamblind/your-right-to-discuss-salaries...

The speech is protected, the use of company resources to distribute said speech is not.

If your workplace is partially remote, one could imagine company resources are where you work. While there is ambiguity, it seems most likely a federal labor complaint or lawsuit against Apple is where the outcome would be determined.

Attempting to censor these conversations in their Slack teams would be similarly illegal I would think, even if Apple employees are operating in a hybrid remote/office model.

We should create a society where it is forbidden to negotiate your own salary. It should be automatically calculated based on someone’s race, gender, age, and other inherited characteristics. Subjective achievements like degrees or career experience should not be included because likely to be the result of historical social injustices. One should not even be allowed to choose a career path because diversity should be equally distributed across all career paths, which necessarily requires to be managed centrally. Basically we should recreate in America the same system like the old Russian USSR where jobs were centrally assigned and salaries equalized regardless of talent. Food should also be central distributed through food stamps - perhaps with an app - to avoid any injustice. It worked well for the Russians. Weren’t they the first to send a man in space?

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