Apple’s global staffing and HR challenges…

Not a Chinese factory

While Apple retail staff in the UK begin the righteous move to unionize, staffing challenges continue in Cupertino, as the Great Resignation hits senior employees, workers jump fences to get out in China and new Apple partner Tata Group plans to hire 45,000 women to make components for iPhone.

We support the unions

Ask anyone with a more than passing knowledge of history and they’ll let you know that unions are good for workers and have given basic working rights, vacations, and a chance for enough time off to do more than attend church on Sunday. Workers who join unions are more likely to enjoy better terms and conditions.

I support them in that.

I recognise that Apple has a relatively backwards-facing opinion of unions. You can’t ignore the way it has apparently treated those who unionize in the states, but it should bow to the inevitable as it’s already beginning to happen here. In Glasgow Apple retail, where employees have become the first in the UK to declare a trade union. Or, as Martin Luther King may have said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere.”

I send solidarity to the staff in Glasgow’s Apple Store. I hope Apple continues to “enhance its industry leading benefits” without favor to its staff, unionized or not.

The right to stay flexible

Speaking of labor relations, Apple’s move to insist on presenteeism may or may not have prompted two recent high profile resignations from its team. The executives in charge of its online retail store and information-systems divisions are stepping down. I don’t know if this had anything to do with the desire for flexible working (it may not have done so given the length of tenure of one of these incumbents), but Apple’s Chief Information Officer Mary Demby and Vice President of Online Retail Anna Matthiasson are both on the move.

They join the exit with Evans Hankey, Apple’s vice president in charge of industrial design and  Chief Privacy Officer Jane Horvath.

You don’t have to be terribly eagle-eyed to spot that all these high powered quitters are women.

Tata’s iPhone army

As many as 45,000 women are apparently to be employed by Tatu Group in India to help make components for iPhones. The plant in Tamil Nadu’s Hosur will hire these people within 24-months, local reports claim. The women will work on new production lines the company plans to set up. The factory currently makes iPhone housings, the cases that hold them together, and currently has 10,000 workers, most of which are women.

We learned recently that Tata Group wants to get into iPhone assembly in India, and that Apple is working to set up a MENA logistics hub in Saudi Arabiaas it seeks to diversify its manufacturing to outside China.

The great escape

Meanwhile in China iPhone manufacturing staff are voting with their feet in a big way as new Covid lockdown restrictions hit Apple’s biggest factory there. China has locked down the industrial zone in Zhengzhou following news of 64 COVID cases. No one will be able to enter or leave for one week, apart from food or medicine delivery under Chinese anti-COVID rules. In response, workers who assemble iPhones have fled the placerather than get hammered by restrictions once again. This is now expected to impact Apple’s Q1 23 results, though to be perfectly frank we’ve heard those kinds of claims before. Perhaps they should unionize?

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