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Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

nytimes.com

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Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#71

Post by spot5010 »

majormajor wrote: post #16
imgabe wrote: post #8

> Richard Dahan, who is deaf, said he had struggled at his former job at an Apple Store in Maryland for six years because his manager refused to provide a sign-language interpreter for him to communicate with customers, which federal law requires under some circumstances. This just doesn't seem like a reasonable accommodation for a retail job. Your whole job is to communicate with the customers. If you need to hire a…

I bought an iPhone from an Apple Store employee who couldn't speak but used a phone to communicate with me by typing out their messages. It was perfectly fine. I'm a bit surprised speech to text these days wouldn't basically take you as far as you need to go for a deaf employee. That said, if you take away jobs with a large communication component from the deaf, that rules out A LOT. I think reasonable accommodations…

Same for me. It was the best customer experience. The employee used her iPad to communicate via text. Brief and straight to the point.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#72

Post by kyleee »

stickfigure wrote: post #63
imgabe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t always get what we want when we go out into the public and deal with other people. Sometimes I want to zip in and out of the grocery store but there’s an old lady in front of me who wants to argue about an expired coupon and it takes longer than I’d like. Such is life.

I stop shopping in places where the customer service is slow. Such is life.

Would you ditch Apple if you had a customer service experience with a deaf person and it took 3-5 minutes longer than it would have with a hearing person?

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#73

Post by Bud »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #67
Bud wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't actually know Tim Cook's salary, do you? Please stop pretending that you do. Hint: the vast majority of his compensation is, and has always been, via stock grants.

You do know that high earners play this game to avoid the sort of tax liabilities ordinary people have to pay? They aren't nobler by taking a $1 salary.

Yes. The fact remains that Tim Cook could not do what was claimed out of his salary. Period, paragraph. Just as obvious: Tim Cook wouldn't do this if he weren't confident in his leadership. Apple stock is up more than 10x since he took over.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#74

Post by barbazoo »

imgabe wrote: post #8

> Richard Dahan, who is deaf, said he had struggled at his former job at an Apple Store in Maryland for six years because his manager refused to provide a sign-language interpreter for him to communicate with customers, which federal law requires under some circumstances. This just doesn't seem like a reasonable accommodation for a retail job. Your whole job is to communicate with the customers. If you need to hire a…

It's a form of inclusion that might not be perfectly efficient as you point out but greatly improves lives of people with disabilities.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#75

Post by ProAm »

anonporridge wrote: post #22
dstaley wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ADA already requires Apple Stores to provide interpretation services or other reasonable accommodations for customers, so it's not much more of an ask to provide those for employees as well.

Apple stores offer this on a scheduled basis, https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/25/apple-retail-store-sign-langu... It's a completely different thing to expect a company to hire 2 people (with 2 full time salary and benefits) when 1 will do. Especially for a low skill job that has no real shortage of potential workers.

> to hire 2 people (with 2 full time salary and benefits) when 1 will do

For one of the most profitable companies in the world, this doesn't seem outrageous (1 extra employee per store, maybe full time, likely not) especially given the fact that Apple doesn't support right-to-repair they will naturally have more foot traffic than most similar businesses.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#76

Post by russelldjimmy »

jimsimmons wrote: post #24

As time goes on, Apple, the de-facto emperor of tech, will lose more of its clothes. They haven't had anything new in 10 years and each year their keynotes get more typical and lacklustre. Yet, Cook is up there using all sorts of superlatives, doing cargo cult innovation.

> Cook is up there using all sorts of superlatives

> keynotes get more typical and lacklustre

Surely huge irony is not lost here

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#77

Post by Spooky23 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #55
vimy wrote: post #5

If I was Tim Cook I would immediately shutdown slack and mandate everyone go back to using email. It’s always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack who are causing a lot of the unrest in tech companies.

> It's always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack who are causing a lot of the unrest in tech companies. This is a common talking point to marginalize political activity in any situation: 'It's just a tiny minority agitating', etc. In every situation, a tiny minority appeals to the majority and sometimes it convinces them. (If a majority of Americans ever protested something, that would be over 160 milli…

A business isn’t a social club. More often than not, agitators have an agenda to agitate no matter what, or to provide air cover for other issues.

When I’ve run into this sort of thing, telltale signs of bullshit activism emerges from sales and marketing people not hitting the metrics, people at risk of being pushed out for performance issues, or people getting passed over.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#78

Post by bschwindHN »

jimsimmons wrote: post #24

As time goes on, Apple, the de-facto emperor of tech, will lose more of its clothes. They haven't had anything new in 10 years and each year their keynotes get more typical and lacklustre. Yet, Cook is up there using all sorts of superlatives, doing cargo cult innovation.

> They haven't had anything new in 10 years

I dunno, their new M1 silicon is pretty dope. Airpod Pros are the most recent thing I bought from them and they're a pleasure to use every day. They're not at the same level of innovation that they were 10 years ago, but they're also not at zero.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#79

Post by krrrh »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #36
s5300 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely a bit of a conundrum though. One must keep in mind that the United States is and near or more always has been a welfare state. We're supposed to have governments and organizations to come up with solutions to these types of societal problems we encounter. The way you seem to be looking at it - yes, I mostly agree that the company should not outright be expected to essentially hire another fully time…

> One must keep in mind that the United States is and near or more always has been a welfare state. If one must keep that in mind, may one ask what definition of "welfare state" has applied to the USA since its founding?

> may one ask what definition of "welfare state" has applied to the USA since its founding?

I’m going to assume that this is a serious question and try to quickly answer it in good faith.

A quick search finds these figures [0] from the Congressional Research Service.

“CRS identified 83 overlapping federal welfare programs that together represented the single largest budget item in 2011—more than the nation spends on Social Security, Medicare, or national defense. The total amount spent on these 80-plus federal welfare programs amounts to roughly $1.03 trillion. Importantly, these figures solely refer to means-tested welfare benefits. They exclude entitlement programs to which people contribute (e.g., Social Security and Medicare).”

Social Security and Medicare are massive entitlements beyond welfare spending that are all but sacrosanct in US politics, and that’s just federal spending.

Looking at total social spending as a share of GDP [1], the US is in line with Australia and Canada at 2016 numbers. The difference between the US at 19% and the Netherlands or Japan at 22.5% or Germany at 25% is one of degree, not of kind. This is especially true when you consider that in absolute terms the difference is even smaller since the US has considerably higher GDP/capita than those countries.

[0] https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS%20Report%20-...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#80

Post by browningstreet »

kyleee wrote: post #72
stickfigure wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stop shopping in places where the customer service is slow. Such is life.

Would you ditch Apple if you had a customer service experience with a deaf person and it took 3-5 minutes longer than it would have with a hearing person?

I’d be more inclined to get a kick out of the situation.
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