The Fallout From Apple’s Bizarre, Dogged Union-Busting Campaign

Workers are calling on management to stop inflicting “traumatic” pressure on other workers trying to unionize.



ILLUSTRATION: ELENA LACEY

APPLE WORKERS IN Towson, Maryland, made history last month when they became the first US retail store to vote to unionize, joining the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). A week and a half later, workers launched a petition on Change.org calling Apple’s union-busting campaign “nothing short of traumatic for many of us.” The petitioners called on the company to refrain from waging similar blitzes at other stores, where several mostly underground campaigns are underway. “We are deeply concerned about our fellow employees’ mental wellbeing because we are all too aware of what awaits them if they decide to organize a union,” they wrote.

Although the pro-union staffers continue to savor their victory, a hangover from Apple’s divisive anti-union campaign lingers. Workers say that some managers who were fed anti-union talking points to deliver during the campaign continue to hold a bias against union supporters, complaining when they miss work and painting them as lazy.

Particularly in smaller workplaces such as Apple stores, fractured relationships are a common casualty of harsh anti-union campaigns. At large workplaces like Amazon warehouses, consultants and far-flung employee relations staff are typically flown in to lead anti-union drives. With smaller teams, management-side law firms often tell companies that “local managers or supervisors will be the most effective anti-union shock troops,” says San Francisco State University labor studies professor John Logan. They have relationships with employees and are generally seen as more trustworthy than outsiders. “But there’s potentially a very high cost to doing that. Because if it’s very adversarial, as these campaigns usually are, it can poison workplace relationships for years to come.”

In May, workers at an Atlanta, Georgia, Apple store—the first to file for a US union election— withdrew their petition to be represented by the Communication Workers of America (CWA) following another bitter anti-union campaign. They plan to regroup and refile early next year. Employees from both stores say that managers erroneously attempted to paint organizing committee members as bullies. “The first time that they talked about it, they mentioned that we bullied people into thinking that a union is something that we need without giving them the information,” says Sydney Rhodes, a member of the Atlanta organizing committee. Kevin Gallagher, a Towson organizing committee member, says that after the union won there, managers told workers they expected an apology for “ill words” that had been said about them. Another organizing committee member reviewed the chat history in their workplace communication app, but neither he nor Gallagher could figure out what this referred to.

Apple employees felt especially blindsided by the ferociousness of the campaign, given the company’s stated commitment to progressive values and inclusivity. The experience “was eye-opening for a lot of people in our store,” says Atlanta organizing committee member Derrick Bowles. “There’s definitely a massive lack of trust now.” The drives at both stores were orchestrated by Littler Mendelson, the country’s largest anti-union law firm, known most recently for its aggressive tactics against Starbucks baristas. “When you hire Littler Mendelson, it’s an indication that you’re prepared to do whatever is necessary to defeat the union campaign,” says Logan. “That you’re prepared to play hardball.”

Littler-trained Apple managers carried out a campaign that workers say created an atmosphere of fear and unease, and, given their familiarity with one another, occasionally veered into the personal. Four employees from the two stores spoke to WIRED about the pressure they endured in their attempts to organize for fairer pay, more manageable schedules, protection from the whims of managers, and more say in the policies that impact their day-to-day work. Apple did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Retail stores begin each day with a “download” meeting, where the managers share company news and prepare them for the day ahead. After the Atlanta store filed its election petition back in April, managers started repurposing download meetings into what are known as “captive audience meetings,” mandatory gatherings where leaders deliver anti-union talking points. Bowles says that managers would share their negative impressions of unions, making remarks like, “I'm from New York. There are a lot of unions there. In my experience, unions are run by bullies and thugs.”

One morning, Bowles attended a meeting in which he says a manager told employees that they were going to practice “nonverbal communication.” The leader told the group to silently line up in order of their birthdays, then by tenure. He then asked each person the same question, starting with the most tenured employee, until four people answered yes. First, he asked each employee whether they wanted a promotion. The first four people said yes. Then he asked whether they wanted priority vacation approval. Again, the first four said yes. How about weekends off? Four yeses in a row. “You could tell that the new people are just completely lost. They don’t know what he’s doing,” says Bowles. Then, as Bowles remembers it, the meeting leader stopped the exercise to say that one of the things he loved about Apple is that it didn’t have a tenure clause, but made decisions based on individual circumstances and performance. “He’s like, ‘You know, some other organizations’”—meaning the union—“‘would like to put in a tenure clause. Man, I’m glad we don’t have that.’”

This appears to have been a creative spin on one of Apple’s anti-union messages. In a list of talking points leaked to Vice, managers were instructed to tell employees that the union would pay more attention to seniority than merit when it came to issues like promotions, desirable shifts, and time off.

Bowles recalls another download in which a manager told employees he’d love them no matter how they voted. When Bowles reassured him that the union campaign wasn’t personal, he says the manager paused, looked at him, and responded, “If my wife and I have a disagreement about something, I want to talk to my wife first. I don’t get a problem with my wife and then go talk to the mistress.” He seemed to be equating the union with an interloping third party.

Since the Atlanta employees had a head start, they would share information with the Towson store so they knew what to expect. Gallagher says managers also tried to co-opt download meetings the day his store announced their union, but he cut them off, saying workers weren’t going to stand for captive audience meetings. Managers did, however, hold “roundtables” in which they discussed the supposed perils of unions, and constantly pulled employees aside one-on-one to criticize the union. According to Rhodes, managers emphasized how grateful employees should be for the pay and benefits they receive from Apple, and suggested that they could lose them if the union won. She says the fearmongering became targeted; one employee was told his immigration assistance could be taken away if the union won.

At a roundtable that Bowles attended in May, a meeting leader said they were going to answer “questions from the team,” despite the fact that he was unaware of questions having been solicited. “If we form a union, could we lose our benefits?” read one anonymous question, to which the leader answered yes. The meeting leaders then listed off individual benefits, such as a generous mental health leave policy, and asked employees to raise their hand if they used it. “Then they’d look at people and say, ‘That mental health benefit you take advantage of, that could be gone.’” Bowles points out that employees would never vote for a contract that stripped them of cherished benefits. (Union contracts must be ratified by a majority of members.)

The CWA union filed an unfair labor practice charge in response to Atlanta’s mandatory captive audience meetings, which the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel has called illegal. In Towson, Apple continued the practice, but changed the meetings from mandatory to optional, which would technically comply with the law. Nonetheless, employees still felt obligated to attend. The meetings were automatically added to people’s schedules, and they had to opt out if they wanted to skip them.

At some point, Gallagher says, management appeared to turn its focus from unions in general to the IAM specifically. They attempted to paint the union as racist, bringing up its history of excluding minorities when it was founded, “without any of the actual historical context of it being the 1880s in Georgia,” notes Gallagher. “Somebody made the point that the union’s run by rich white men,” says Graham DeYoung, a 15-year Apple employee and organizing committee member at the Towson store. “I said, ‘Hey, look at the Apple board of directors.’”

In Atlanta, managers shared a letter written by an employee of the Grand Central Station store in New York City about the union drive there. At the time, Grand Central was affiliated with a different union, Workers United. WIRED reviewed the letter, in which the employee professed to support unions, but wrote, “I do not support THIS union … We’re absolutely allowed to have differences in opinions, we don’t all have to want the same things, or even be friends—but the whispers, the pettiness, the DEATH THREATS, and the straight up ridiculous conspiracy theories, and plots to take each other down has to STOP!”

The idea that organizers were issuing death threats “was an absurd thing in the first place,” says Bowles. “But then when it got posted in our store, it was very clear that the intent was to associate our organizing committee with those kinds of things.”

Employees of both stores say managers amplified the voices of anti-union staff. Gallagher says that when he called employee relations to complain about a coworker who spread false rumors about organizing committee members, he was told that the employee had a right to their opinion. In Atlanta, Rhodes says, a store leader told union supporters they couldn’t discuss the union during work hours, but allowed anti-union staff to freely push their rhetoric.

Ultimately the Atlanta employees withdrew their petition after they weren’t able to marshal enough signatures for a letter they planned to send management, which doubled as a gauge of support. “I feel like the hole in the foundation was, they recognized that our team was young,” says Rhodes. “Those who are new, they’re scared. They’ve never done something like this. They may not know anybody who’s a part of something like this, because in the South, there aren’t a lot of unions.”

“We had so many people being like, I just want this to be fucking over,” says DeYoung, which Logan says is the deliberate purpose of these campaigns. People thought, “If this is what the voting process is like to just say, ‘We want to do this,’ it’s only going to get worse.”

DeYoung is part of a private chat among retail employees nationwide. After Towson won their election, several workers at other stores said in the chat that they started hearing from managers who tried to paint his store as an outlier. “Stuff like, Towson is a special store. They had management problems. It’s kind of a bullying campaign.”

Despite the lingering tensions within the store, Gallagher says, “The hostility that we got from leadership was counteracted tenfold by the support that we got from everybody else … We were able to prove that even one of the most valuable companies in the entire world throwing all their resources at us wasn’t able to stop us.”

Although the union busting campaign ground some workers down, it also mobilized them. When he first heard about the union effort, DeYoung was on the fence about joining. He comes from a conservative background where he was taught not to bite the hand that feeds him. But “seeing the tactics of the company that I put my neck out for 15 years, that sealed the deal for me.”