Apple fires hundreds of contract workers, previously assured jobs were safe
indiatoday.in
indiatoday.in
The “previously assured jobs were safe” claim is ungrounded in the article, which lamely provides little more than an anonymous source mentioning an unnamed Apple employee: “One of the contractors reportedly said that Apple previously assured the workers that their jobs were safe.”
It's an even more tenuous position than full-time employee and frankly I think it's good that contract workers were laid off ahead of any full time workers. I'm not sure why some people are trying to frame this as bad or immoral. It's the entire point of contract workers and you know that coming in as a contract worker. It's disappointing but that's the reality of the situation.
They sometimes have a choice between unemployment, true.
Discuss.
The system is basically a middle finger to the bottom 50% of the country — by increasing poverty, by accentuating the consequences of poverty, and impeding the upward mobility of people in poverty.
If they are looking for a permanent position, they should find a job with a permanent position. If those jobs aren't available or they aren't qualified for them... are you saying they deserve a permanent position anyway?
>You are lying and putting words in my mouth.
Ok, lets just use your own words to work through this.
>they should accept this reality.
How about "I took offense to his line of reasoning that contract workers should just accept this reality."
Is that better for you?
You're also entirely missing the nuance of this conversation wherein a system exists for Apple to exploit a labor force and avoid the extra costs associated with fulltime employment (healthcare, benefits, etc). In your worldview, this is entirely reasonable and the trillion dollar company exploiting these workers is entirely above reproach. It is in fact the fault of the employees for either being too shortsighted with their contract employment or just not good enough to qualify for things like healthcare.
See why that might come across as gross to someone?
Yes, this is better. They need to accept their reality. They can't accept a temporary job and they cry when their temporary job gets cancelled. It's the reality of their situation. They shouldn't be happy about it in the same way that coal miners shouldn't be happy about working in a coal mine, but sometimes that's just how life works out.
> a system exists for Apple to exploit a labor force
I completely disagree they are being exploited. Some jobs are permanent and some jobs are temporary. That's reality. Do you expect waiters and cab drivers to be full time employees as well? Should M&A consultants working on a project be made permanent employees as well? Should football players be permanent employees? I certainly don't.
Exploit (Oxford def.): "make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)." Contractor (Oxford def.): "a person or company that undertakes a contract to provide materials or labor to perform a service or do a job"
Did Apple mislead these people into thinking their contracts were indefinite or not potentially bound by some end date? Did Apple retract guaranteed equity in the company?
This is literally what the contractor market is for: provide resources in increasing and decreasing amount due to market demands.
I certainly sympathize for the long tenured full time tech employees getting laid off. I really sympathize with the fact that contractors tend to be non-native or immigrant demographics, or out-sourced to other countries. Maybe that's what you were talking about, but seems like an intentionally generaliezd critique of the contracting industry.
Regardless, are you saying that the company owes these people a permanent position?
contractors should not expect long-term employment unless they have a contract that specifies that.
The other day I saw a position to work at Google as a contractor. It said undetermined duration.
>According to one estimate from the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, reported and unreported wage theft could amount to as much as $50 billion per year owed to workers. > >That number dwarfs criminal offenses such as robbery, which accounted for just under $500 million in losses in 2019, according to FBI data. Burglary accounted for about $3 billion in losses that same year, and motor vehicle theft made up about $6 billion.
is time theft a $50 billion problem?
Does this still fall in the domain of independent contractor misclassification?
In trying to find other articles that might have a link directly to it I also found https://www.outlookindia.com/business/tech-layoffs-2023-appl...
> According to a report in the New York Post, over the last few days, Apple has laid off hundreds of contract workers – workers that were actually employed by outside agencies but worked alongside Apple employees on various projects.
which... doesn't fill me with confidence that I will find one. ... and digging a bit more... https://nypost.com/2023/02/16/apple-has-begun-firing-contrac...
It is the New York Post (not the Times).
I do have sympathy for people that thought they were on a 6/12/whatever month contract and let go early. But this NY Post article is really reaching.
That article says:
> According to a report in the New York Post, over the last few days, Apple has laid off hundreds of contract workers – workers that were actually employed by outside agencies but worked alongside Apple employees on various projects.
The NY Post article (not Times) is https://nypost.com/2023/02/16/apple-has-begun-firing-contrac... from a few days ago. It has no sources to it.
Getting rid of all your contractors is a way of looking like you haven't done layoffs. (In all fairness, that's part of the deal a contractor agrees to. However many of these people were employees of a temp agency or “headshop” and weren’t necessarily benefiting financially from this arrangement.)
This would be like a newspaper being outraged about someone cancelling their subscription because they thought the subscription was safe.
They're often paid less than employees (e.g. today's article [1] that includes a part on raters at Google alleges that they get $14 while Google's minimum hourly pay for any employee is $15), and the agency is the one taking the blame for mistreatment while the company can say "we didn't know! that's terrible!" and then get the next staffing agency, tell them exactly what they want, and have another fall guy to take the blame.
It's not about "we need a hundred people for the next 5 weeks on this, quick", it's about not hiring non-essential employees directly. Google will hire the PhDs, but not the quality raters or content moderators, because they are much easier to replace and there's no value to Google in employing them directly while they'd take PR hit if they were the actual employer (even though they're the ones saying what to do, when to do it and how to do it, which is often used as a test whether you're an employee or a contractor).