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Apple Store Workers Get First U.S. Contract

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The agreement at a Maryland store, the first to unionize, raises wages roughly 10 percent over three years and guarantees benefits and severance pay.Workers at the first unionized Apple Store in the country ratified a labor contract with the tech giant on Tuesday, after a year and a half in which bargaining appeared to stall for long stretches and union campaigns at other stores fell short.After the union announced the outcome, Apple said it did not dispute the result and was pleased to have an agreement.The contract, covering about 85 workers at a Towson, Md., store who voted to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in June 2022, will provide a typical worker with a raise of roughly 10 percent over the next three years.The workers will also effectively receive the same benefits as those in nonunion stores — a point of contention since the company introduced new benefits that excluded union stores in the fall of 2022 — as well as guaranteed severance pay.“We are giving our members a voice in their futures and a strong first step toward further gains,” the store’s bargaining committee said in a statement after reaching a deal with the company. “Together, we can build on this success in store after store.”The contract talks had appeared to bog down over equal access to the benefits that other stores receive, and over a nationwide change in Apple’s scheduling and availability policy for part-time workers. The union said the policy change would have forced roughly half a dozen Towson workers to quit because of conflicts with other commitments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Pay Later’ Lenders Have an Issue With Credit Bureaus

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    Shoppers in recent years have embraced “buy now, pay later” loans as an easy, interest-free way to purchase everything from sweaters to concert tickets.The loans typically are not reported on consumers’ credit reports, however, or reflected in their credit scores. That has stoked concerns that users might be taking on an outsize amount of debt that is invisible to both lenders and financial regulators.So in February, when Apple announced it would start reporting loans made through its Apple Pay Later program to Experian, one of the three major U.S. credit bureaus, it looked like a watershed moment for the fast-growing “buy now, pay later” category.But none of the other major pay-later providers have followed Apple’s lead. And while credit bureaus and lenders say they are interested in finding a way to work together, the gulf between the two sides remains wide — so much so that some pay-later firms are exploring creating an alternative credit bureau to handle their loans.“I haven’t seen really meaningful progress,” said David Sykes, chief commercial officer of Klarna, one of the largest pay-later firms.“Buy now, pay later” loans allow consumers to pay for purchases over time, often in four installments over six weeks, interest free. They surged in popularity during the pandemic, when they helped fuel an online-shopping boom. The rapid growth has continued: The retail industry attributed its record-setting holiday sales in part to the popularity of pay-later products.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Trustbuster Who Has Apple and Google in His Sights

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    Shortly after Jonathan Kanter took over the Justice Department’s antitrust division in November 2021, the agency secured an additional $50 million to investigate monopolies, bust criminal cartels and block mergers.To celebrate, Mr. Kanter bought a prop of a giant check, placed it outside his office and wrote on the check’s memo line: “Break ’Em Up.”Mr. Kanter, 50, has pushed that philosophy ever since, becoming a lead architect of the most significant effort in decades to fight the concentration of power in corporate America. On Thursday, he took his biggest swing when the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. In the 88-page lawsuit, the government argued that Apple had violated antitrust laws with practices intended to keep customers reliant on its iPhones and less likely to switch to competing devices.That lawsuit joins two Justice Department antitrust cases against Google that argue the company illegally shored up monopolies. Mr. Kanter’s staff has also challenged numerous corporate mergers, including suing to stop JetBlue Airways from buying Spirit Airlines.“We want to help real people by making sure that our antitrust laws work for workers, work for consumers, work for entrepreneurs and work to protect our democratic values,” Mr. Kanter said in a January interview. He declined to comment on the Google cases and other active litigation.At a news conference about the Apple lawsuit on Thursday, Mr. Kanter compared the action to past Justice Department challenges to Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft. The suit is aimed at protecting “the market for the innovations that we can’t yet perceive,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Microsoft Tops Apple to Become Most Valuable Public Company

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    The shift is indicative of the importance of new artificial intelligence technology to Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors.For more than a decade, Apple was the stock market’s undisputed king. It first overtook Exxon Mobil as the world’s most valuable public company in 2011 and held the title almost without interruption.But a transfer of power has begun.On Friday, Microsoft surpassed Apple, claiming the crown after its market value surged by more than $1 trillion over the past year. Microsoft finished the day at $2.89 trillion, higher than Apple’s $2.87 trillion, according to Bloomberg.The change is part of a reordering of the stock market that was set in motion by the advent of generative artificial intelligence. The technology, which can answer questions, create images and write code, has been heralded for its potential to disrupt businesses and create trillions of dollars in economic value.When Apple replaced Exxon, it ushered in an era of tech supremacy. The values of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google dwarfed former market leaders like Walmart, JPMorgan Chase and General Motors.The tech industry still dominates the top of the list, but the companies with the most momentum have put generative A.I. at the forefront of their future business plans. The combined value of Microsoft, Nvidia and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, increased by $2.5 trillion last year. Their performances outshined Apple, which posted a smaller share price increase in 2023.“It simply comes down to gen A.I.,” said Brad Reback, an analyst at the investment bank Stifel. Generative A.I. will have an impact on all of Microsoft’s businesses, including its largest, he said, while “Apple doesn’t have much of an A.I. story yet.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Biden Administration Unveils Tougher Guidelines on Mergers

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    The proposed road map for regulatory reviews, last updated in 2020, includes a focus on tech platforms for the first time.The Biden administration’s top antitrust officials unveiled tougher guidelines against tech mergers on Wednesday, signaling their deepening scrutiny of the industry despite recent court losses in their attempts to block tech deal-making.Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, the top antitrust official at the Department of Justice, released draft guidelines for merger reviews that for the first time include a focus on digital platforms and how dominant companies can use their scale to harm future rivals.The guidelines — which generally provide a road map for whether regulators block or approve deals — show the Biden administration’s commitment to an aggressive antitrust agenda aimed at curtailing the power of companies like Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon.The guidelines, which aren’t enforced by law, follow a losing streak in the courts. A ruling last week prevented the F.T.C. from delaying the closing of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the video game maker Activision Blizzard. In January, a court sided against the F.T.C. in its lawsuit to stop Meta’s purchase of Within, a virtual reality app maker.The forceful antitrust posture is a pillar of President Biden’s agenda to stamp out economic inequality and encourage greater competition. “Promoting competition to lower costs and support small businesses and entrepreneurs is a central part of Bidenomics,” a senior administration official said in a call with reporters.The new guidelines would apply to all deals across the economy. But they highlight obstacles to competition among digital platforms, including how an acquisition of a nascent rival may be intended to kill off future competition. Such deals, known as killer acquisitions, are prevalent in the tech industry and at the heart of an F.T.C. antitrust lawsuit against Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The agency has accused Meta of buying Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to prevent future competition.The F.T.C. and Justice Department also said they would look at how companies used their scale, including their large number of users, to ward off competition. These so-called network effects have helped companies like Meta and Google maintain their dominance in social media and internet search.The agencies also laid out ways in which mergers involving “platform” businesses, the model used by Amazon’s online store and Apple’s App Store, could harm competition. An acquisition could hurt competition by giving a platform control over a significant stream of data, the draft guidelines said, echoing concerns that tech giants use their vast troves of information to squash rivals.“As markets and commercial realities change, it is vital that we adapt our law enforcement tools to keep pace so that we can protect competition in a manner that reflects the intricacies of our modern economy,” Mr. Kanter said in a statement. “Simply put, competition today looks different than it did 50 — or even 15 — years ago.”While they lack the force of law, the guidelines can influence how judges look at challenges to mergers and acquisitions. The effort to update the guidelines has been closely watched by businesses and corporate lawyers that navigate regulatory scrutiny of megadeals.The guidelines were last updated in 2020. In 2021, Mr. Biden ordered the Justice Department and the F.T.C. to update them again as part of a broader effort to improve competition across the economy. The agencies will take public comment on the proposals and could make amendments before final guidelines are adopted.“These guidelines contain critical updates while ensuring fidelity to the mandate Congress has given us and the legal precedent on the books,” Ms. Khan said in a statement.While the F.T.C. experienced the recent court losses, it has forced some companies, including the chip-maker Nvidia and the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, to abandon some large deals. The Justice Department blocked the publisher Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster, using an unusual argument that the merger would harm authors who sold the publication rights to their books. More

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    As U.S. and Chinese Officials Meet, Businesses Temper Their Hopes

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    Chief executives in the U.S. have long pushed for closer ties between the two countries. Now they just hope a rocky situation won’t get worse.In a meeting in Beijing on Friday, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, traded warm smiles with Bill Gates and praised Mr. Gates as “the first American friend” he had met this year.The encounters in Beijing between Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his Chinese counterparts, starting on Sunday, are likely to feel noticeably chillier.The high-level meetings are aimed at getting the U.S.-China relationship back on track, and many American business leaders have been pushing the Biden administration to try to restore some stability in one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships.But for business leaders, and for officials on both sides, expectations for the meetings appear modest, with two main goals for the talks. One is to restore communication between the governments, which broke down this year after a Chinese surveillance balloon flew into U.S. airspace and Mr. Blinken canceled a visit scheduled for February. The other is to halt any further decline in the countries’ relationship.There is already evidence of the impact of the fraying ties. Foreign direct investment in China has fallen to an 18-year low. A 2023 survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China showed that companies still see the Chinese market as a priority, but that their willingness to invest there is declining.“The economic relationship has become so dismal that any sign of progress is welcome, though expectations are low for any sort of a breakthrough,” said Jake Colvin, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents multinational businesses.“The hope is that high-level dialogues like this can start to inject some certainty for business into an increasingly fraught and unpredictable trade relationship,” he said.Still, as one of the world’s largest consumer markets and home to many factories that supply global businesses, China exerts a powerful pull. This year, as it eased its travel restrictions after three years of pandemic lockdowns, a parade of chief executives made trips to China, including Mary Barra of General Motors, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone.On a visit to China this month, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and owner of Twitter, described the American and Chinese economies as “conjoined twins” and said he opposed to efforts to split them. Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, traveled to China in March and lauded the company’s “symbiotic” relationship with the nation.Sam Altman, the leader of OpenAI, which makes the ChatGPT chatbot, appeared virtually at a conference in Beijing this month, saying American and Chinese researchers should continue to work together to counter the risks of artificial intelligence.The tech industry, which has forged lucrative relationships with Chinese manufacturers and consumers, has warily watched Washington’s aggressive approach to China. While industry groups acknowledge the importance of moves to safeguard national security, they have urged the Biden administration to carefully calibrate its actions.Wendy Cutler, a former diplomat and trade negotiator who is now vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said the United States and China might announce some small steps forward at the end of the meetings. The governments might agree, she said, to increase the paltry number of flights between their countries or the visas they are issuing to foreign visitors.But both sides will have plenty of grievances to air, Ms. Cutler said. Chinese officials are likely to complain about U.S. tariffs on goods made in China and restrictions on U.S. firms selling coveted chip technology to China. American officials may highlight China’s deteriorating business environment and its recent move to bar companies that handle critical information from buying microchips made by the U.S. company Micron.“I’m not expecting any breakthroughs, particularly on the economic front,” Ms. Cutler said, adding, “Neither side will want to be smiling.”American officials hope Mr. Blinken’s visit paves the way for more cooperation, including on issues like climate change and the restructuring the debt loads of developing countries. Other officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, are considering visits to China this year, and Mr. Xi and President Biden may meet directly at either the Group of 20 meetings in Delhi in September or an Asia-Pacific economic meeting in San Francisco in November.In recent months, Biden officials have tried to mend the rift between the countries by arguing for a more “constructive” relationship. They have echoed European officials in saying their desire is for “de-risking and diversifying” their economic relationships with China, not “decoupling.”But trust between the governments has eroded, and Chinese officials appear to be skeptical of how much the Biden administration can do to restore ties.The extensive U.S. restrictions on the semiconductor technology that can be shared with China, which were issued in October, continue to rankle officials in Beijing. The United States has added dozens of Chinese companies to sanctions lists for aiding the Chinese military and surveillance state, or circumventing U.S. restrictions against trading with Iran and Russia.Biden administration officials are weighing further restrictions on China, including a long-delayed order covering certain U.S. venture capital investments. And the White House faces intense pressure from Congress to do more to crack down on national security threats emanating from Beijing.Not all companies are pushing for improved ties. Some with less exposure to China have tried to reap political benefits in Washington from the growing competition with the country. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has repeatedly raised concerns about TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app that has proved a formidable competitor to Instagram.“It’s really a dispute over the degree,” said James Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “How accommodating are you? How confrontational are you?”How aggressively companies are resisting the tensions with China, Mr. Lewis said, is linked to their exposure to the country’s market.“I think a lot of this has to do with your presence in China,” he said. More

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    Companies Are Pushing Back Harder on Union Efforts, Workers Say

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    Apple, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and REI are accused of targeting union supporters after organizing efforts gained traction, charges the companies deny.After working for more than seven years at an Apple store in Kansas City, Mo., Gemma Wyatt ran into trouble.Last year, she said, managers disciplined her for clocking in late a few times over the previous several weeks. Then, in February, Apple fired her after she missed a store meeting because she was sick but failed to notify managers soon enough, according to Ms. Wyatt.She was at least the fifth Apple employee the store had fired since this fall, all of whom had been active in union organizing there. The terminations came after two other Apple stores voted to unionize.“It took us time to realize they weren’t firing us just because of time and attendance,” said Ms. Wyatt, who is part of a charge filed with the National Labor Relations Board in March accusing Apple of unfair labor practices.Apple said it had not disciplined or fired any workers in retaliation for union activity. “We strongly deny these claims and look forward to providing the full set of facts to the N.L.R.B.,” a spokeswoman said.A pattern of similar worker accusations — and corporate denials — has arisen at Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and REI as retail workers have sought to form unions in the past two years.Initially, the employers countered the organizing campaigns with criticism of unions and other means of dissuasion. At Starbucks, there were staffing and management changes at the local level, and top executives were dispatched. But workers say that in each case, after unionization efforts succeeded at one or two stores, the companies became more aggressive.Some labor relations experts say the companies’ progressive public profiles may help explain why they chose to hold back at the outset.“You’re espousing these values but saying this other organization claiming the same values” — the union — “isn’t good for your work force,” said David Pryzbylski, a labor lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg who represents employers. “It puts you in a little bit of corner.”Once the union wins a few elections, however, “you pull out all the stops,” Mr. Pryzbylski said.In some cases, the apparent escalation of company pushback has coincided with a slowing down of the union campaigns. At Starbucks, filings for union elections fell below 10 in August, from about 70 five months earlier, and no Apple store has filed for a union election since November.At Starbucks, the company unlawfully dismissed seven Buffalo-area employees last year, not long after the union won two elections there, according to a ruling by a federal administrative judge.A Trader Joe’s store in Louisville, Ky., which was the third at the company to unionize, fired two employees who were supportive of the union campaign and has formally disciplined several more, said Connor Hovey, a worker involved in the organizing. Documents shared by Mr. Hovey show the company citing a variety of issues, such as dress-code violations, tardiness and excessively long breaks.And in advance of a recent union election at an REI near Cleveland, management sought to exclude certain categories of workers from voting, according to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. It said the chain, a co-op that sells recreational gear, had made no such challenge in two previous elections, in which workers voted to unionize. (The union said the company had backed down after workers at the Cleveland-area store walked out, and the store voted to unionize in March.)Jess Raimundo, a spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers, which is also seeking to unionize REI stores, said the co-op had formally disciplined one employee in Durham, N.C., and put another on leave and later fired him over a workplace action that took place after the workers filed for a union election last month.Starbucks, which is appealing the ruling involving the Buffalo-area employees, has said the firings and discipline were unrelated to union organizing. A Trader Joe’s spokeswoman said that the company had never disciplined an employee for seeking to unionize but that unionizing efforts didn’t exempt an employee from job responsibilities.An REI spokeswoman said that the co-op sought to exclude certain categories of workers near Cleveland because it believed their duties made them ineligible to join a union, and that it had reached an agreement on the issue independent of the walkout. The spokeswoman said the two Durham employees had been disciplined for violations of company policies, not union activity.Across the companies, the shift is such that some organizers look back on their union campaigns’ early days with an odd measure of nostalgia.“Thinking about it, I wondered why they didn’t fight harder at our store,” said Maeg Yosef, a worker and an organizer at a Trader Joe’s in Massachusetts that became the company’s first store to unionize last year. “They were like, ‘Oops, you won’ and certified us. It was really hard, but relatively easy compared to the things they could have done.”The fight at Apple followed a similar trajectory. The company did not hide its suspicion of unions when workers at a U.S. store first filed for an election in April 2022, in Atlanta. Managers emphasized that employees could receive fewer promotions and less flexible hours if they unionized, and the company circulated a video of its head of retail questioning the wisdom of putting “another organization in the middle of our relationship.”Apple’s response was similar in two other union campaigns. But although the union withdrew its election filing in Atlanta, unions won elections in both subsequent cases — first in Towson, Md., in June and then in Oklahoma City in October.According to workers, the company became more aggressive once union organizers made inroads. Around the time that employees in Oklahoma City filed for a union election in September, managers at the Kansas City store disciplined several who supported unionizing for issues related to tardiness or absences that other workers typically have not been punished for, union backers said.Terminations began before the end of the year. D’lite Xiong, a union supporter who started at the Kansas City store in 2021 and uses gender-neutral pronouns, said they were told they were being fired just before Halloween. Mx. Xiong went on leave to buy time to appeal the decision, but was officially let go upon returning in January.D’lite Xiong, a union supporter, was fired from an Apple store in Kansas City, Mo. several months ago. Will Newton for The New York Times“It didn’t make sense to me — I had recently gotten promoted,” said Mx. Xiong, who speculated that the company discovered their role in union organizing after they sought to enlist co-workers. “I was praised for doing a great job.”The Communications Workers of America, which represents Apple workers in Oklahoma and has supported workers seeking to unionize the Kansas City store, filed the unfair labor practice charge against the company over the firings in March.John Logan, a professor at San Francisco State University who is an expert on anti-union campaigns, said companies often considered the potential dissatisfaction of customers, investors and even white-collar corporate employees when calibrating their response to a union campaign.“There’s something deeply threatening about the idea that you might be on the verge of losing them,” Mr. Logan said of corporate employees.But even these considerations, he said, tend to fade once a campaign gains traction: “The overriding priority is, ‘We have to crush this.’”This year, more than 70 Starbucks corporate employees placed their names on a petition calling on the company to stay neutral in union elections and to “respect federal labor laws.” The National Labor Relations Board has issued dozens of complaints against the company accusing it of illegal behavior, which the company denies.Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks chief executive, was quick to push back against such accusations while testifying before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in March, telling one senator, “I take offense with you categorizing me or Starbucks as a union-buster.”In late April, the labor board issued a complaint accusing the company of failing to bargain in good faith at more than 100 stores.A company spokesman attributed the delay to the union, including its insistence on broadcasting sessions using video-chat software, which could make it difficult to discuss sensitive topics.Apple, too, appears intent on signaling that it is not hostile to labor. The company agreed this year to assess its U.S. labor practices for consistency with its human rights policy. And the company has reached tentative agreements with the union at its Towson store on a handful of issues, such as a commitment that workers at the store will receive any improvement in 401(k) benefits that nonunion retail workers at the company might receive.Yet despite these gestures, there has been little progress on most of the union’s top noneconomic priorities, such as grievance procedures, and the company has sought broad contract provisions that could substantially weaken the union. For example, under a proposed a management-rights clause obtained by The New York Times, Apple would have wide latitude to use nonunion workers and contractors to do work performed by union members, which could shrink union membership. Labor negotiations typically start with noneconomic issues before moving to matters like wages and paid time off.Apple did not comment on the contract negotiations, but the workers in Oklahoma City have characterized their initial bargaining sessions as “very productive.”Mr. Pryzbylski, the lawyer who represents employers, said Apple’s preferred management-rights clause was “about as robust and aggressive as you can make it,” though he said it was not unusual for companies to seek such broad rights in their first contract.Workers expressed frustration at the breadth of the management proposal. “Everyone from the union at the table had never seen one so long,” said Kevin Gallagher, who serves on the bargaining committee in Towson. “They basically wanted to maintain all the rights of not having a union.” More

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    Apple Reaches Deal With Investors to Audit Its Labor Practices

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    The tech giant will assess its compliance with its official human rights policy, according to a federal filing.Apple will conduct an assessment of its U.S. labor practices under an agreement with a coalition of investors that includes five New York City pension funds.The assessment will focus on whether Apple is complying with its official human rights policy as it relates to “workers’ freedom of association and collective bargaining rights in the United States,” the company said in a filing last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The audit comes amid complaints by federal regulators and employees that the company has repeatedly violated workers’ labor rights as they have sought to unionize over the past year. Apple has denied the accusations.“There’s a big apparent gap between Apple’s stated human rights policies regarding worker organizing, and its practices,” said Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, who helped initiate the discussion with Apple on behalf of the city’s public worker pension funds.As part of its agreement with the coalition of investors, which also includes other pension funds for unionized workers, Apple agreed to hire a third-party firm to conduct the assessment, the coalition said in a letter to the company’s chairman on Tuesday.Labor Organizing and Union DrivesN.Y.C. Nurses’ Strike: Nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Mount Sinai in Manhattan ended a three-day strike after the hospitals agreed to add staffing and improve working conditions.Amazon: A federal labor official rejected the company’s attempt to overturn a union victory at a warehouse on Staten Island, removing a key obstacle to contract negotiations between the union and the company.A Union Win: Organized labor claimed a big victory on Jan. 3, gaining a foothold among about 300 employees at a video game maker owned by Microsoft.Electric Vehicles: In a milestone for the sector, employees at an E.V. battery plant in Ohio voted to join the United Automobile Workers union, citing pay and safety issues as key reasons.The letter also laid out recommendations for the assessment, which include hiring a firm that has expertise in labor rights and that does not advise companies on how to avoid unionization. It recommended that the firm be “as independent as practicable.”Apple’s federal filing did not refer explicitly to a third party, and the company declined to comment further.Members of the investor coalition controlled about $7 billion worth of Apple stock as of last week, out of a market capitalization of more than $2 trillion. In its financial filing announcing the assessment, Apple offered few details, saying that it would conduct the assessment by the end of the year and that it would publish a report related to the assessment.Last year, workers voted to unionize at two Apple stores — in Townson, Md., and Oklahoma City — and workers at two other stores filed petitions to hold union election before withdrawing them.Many workers involved in union organizing at the company said they enjoyed their jobs and praised their employer, citing benefits like health care and stock grants and the satisfaction of working with Apple products. But they said they hoped that unionizing would help them win better pay, more input into scheduling and more transparency when it comes to obtaining job assignments and promotions.In May, Apple announced that it was raising its minimum hourly starting wage to $22 from $20, a step that some workers interpreted as an effort to undermine their organizing campaigns.Workers have also filed charges accusing Apple of labor law violations in at least six stores, including charges that the company illegally monitored them, prohibited union fliers in a break room, interrogated them about their organizing, threatened them for organizing and that it stated that unionizing would be futile.The Communications Workers of America, the union representing Apple workers in Oklahoma City, has also filed a charge accusing Apple of setting up an illegal company union at a store in Columbus, Ohio — one created and controlled by management with the aim of stifling support for an independent union.The National Labor Relations Board has issued formal complaints in two of the cases, involving stores in Atlanta and New York.Apple has said that “we strongly disagree” with the claims brought before the labor board and that it looks forward to defending itself. The company has emphasized that “regular, open, honest, and direct communication with our team members is a key part of Apple’s collaborative culture.”The investor coalition that pushed for the labor assessment argues that Apple’s response to the union campaigns is at odds with its human rights policy because that policy commits it to respect the International Labor Organization’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which includes “freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining.”Mr. Lander, the New York comptroller, said that the coalition initially reached out to Apple’s board last spring to discuss the company’s posture toward the union organizing, but that it did not get a substantive response.The coalition then filed a shareholder proposal in September urging Apple to hire an outside firm to assess whether the company was following through on its stated commitment to labor rights. The company responded late last year and the two sides worked out an agreement in return for the coalition withdrawing its proposal, according to Mr. Lander.A coalition of some of the same investors, including the New York pension funds, has filed a similar proposal at Starbucks, where workers have voted to unionize at more than 250 company-owned stores since late 2021. Like Apple, Starbucks has cited its commitment to the International Labor Organization standards like freedom of association and the right to take part in collective bargaining.But Starbucks has consistently opposed its employees’ attempts to unionize, and Starbucks has not engaged with the coalition of investors to work out an agreement. Jonas Kron, chief advocacy officer of Trillium Asset Management, one of the investors pushing proposals at both companies, said he expected the Starbucks proposal to go to a vote of the company’s shareholders. The company declined to comment.The federal labor board has issued a few dozen formal complaints against Starbucks for violations including retaliating against workers involved in organizing and discriminating against unionized workers when introducing new benefits; the company has denied breaking labor laws. More

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    How Is Your Company Responding to Labor Organizing? We Want to Hear.

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    Employers are taking a variety of approaches to union campaigns.An Amazon Labor Union rally on Staten Island in April.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesMaterials being prepared for workers seeking to unionize Starbucks stores.Tony Luong for The New York TimesThere has been a surge in labor organizing among baristas at Starbucks, warehouse workers at Amazon and retail workers at Apple and Trader Joe’s. They have made their voices heard, though only a fraction of each group has joined a union, and some have rejected unionization.We’d like to hear the voices of those farther from the front lines — managers and white-collar workers at those companies, particularly those at corporate headquarters. If you fit this profile, please consider responding to the questions below. Your answers may help us better understand the state of labor relations and inform our reporting.We won’t publish your name or any part of your submission without contacting you first. If you prefer to share tips or thoughts confidentially, you can do so here.Tell us how your employer is dealing with union efforts. More