Apple continues to shut down employee pay equity surveys – and labor lawyers say it’s illegal

Apple insists it doesn’t have a problem with wage inequality. Skeptical Apple employees have tried to verify this claim by sending out informal surveys of people’s income, especially of women and underrepresented minorities. But the company closed three of those surveys, citing strict rules on how employees can collect data. Now several labor lawyers say The edge the company may be violating worker protections: polls can be seen as a form of union organizing – under US law, employees have the right to discuss compensation.

“Apple cannot stop its employees from discussing pay equity with respect to protected classes,” said Vincent P. White, employment lawyer at White, Hilferty & Albanese. “If they were, they could tell people not to talk about pronouns. The logical outgrowth of that doesn’t even follow. I consider their efforts to shut this down as an act of retaliation. “

The first known survey began in the spring and asked people to voluntarily provide information about their salary in addition to their identification in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and disability. After around 100 responses, Apple’s staff team – the name of the company for what is commonly referred to as human resources – asked employees to complete the survey, saying demographic questions constituted information. personal identification, or PII.

Last week, employees attempted to launch another pay equity survey, but were again asked to withdraw it because it included a question on gender. When they created a new gender-neutral survey, the Apple team reportedly said it needed to be shut down because it was hosted on the company’s Box account.

“It’s like a 2021 version of a dock foreman telling people they can’t compare their wages in the 1800s,” White explains. “This is nothing new. It’s just the most recent version of “you can’t talk about your salary”.

The people team also sent employees the following information about ‘banned investigations’:

Polls prohibited
The following employee surveys are prohibited in all cases and cannot be conducted.

Surveys as data collection

Surveys are not permitted to be used as a means of collecting identifiable employee data without following the usual process for obtaining that data from the People team. This includes all questions about an employee’s address, demographics, etc., except the country or region of collection, which is allowed.

The use of surveys as a tool for collecting health information – including, but not limited to, health reports, test results, and immunization status – is also prohibited.

All requests for identifiable employee data should be submitted to the People team through the People Report Request Form. If approved, the People team will deliver employee data directly from their systems.

Surveys requesting data on diversity
Diversity data is highly sensitive personal data. If you need such information, you should work with your I&D business partner and the I&D Insights and Solutions team before collecting any data.

“These rules may themselves violate the protected right to concerted activity – while [Apple] could indicate to these manual-type rules that you have agreed not to do this as a condition of employment, it does not mean that they can legally prevent employees from doing what they do ”, explains Veena Dubal, professor of right at UC Hastings.

Now Apple engineer Dear Scarlett has launched a new Typeform investigation, which she is paying out of pocket. “I was looking at level.fyi (a website that allows people to compare salary data between companies) and noticed some very low salaries in a certain geographic area that were 10-15% lower than in other team members, ”Scarlett said. . “Every time I looked at the genre, it was women. I’m not going to say this is a definitive problem, but it is a prompt for anyone to ask if this is a widespread problem. We should be able to easily find out whether this is the case or not in order to know whether people are really being paid fairly.

The new survey, which has nearly 500 entries, asks employees to provide information on their salary, level, team, last RSU grant, seniority at Apple, geographic location, signing bonus, experience relevant work, as well as whether they are permanently remote. , and a member of an under-represented race or sex.

“We want our colleagues and industry peers to know Apple’s pay scales and give minority and potential employees the confidence to negotiate fair wages and bonuses,” the survey said.

Grace Reckers, an organizer for the International Union of Office and Professional Employees, says the fact that this information is all voluntary should protect employees. “This is a protected activity – because you choose to participate in the survey, I don’t even know how the PII excuse would work or matter.”

Scarlett says Apple’s response to the polls has only made employees more suspicious: gender, race or disability. But it’s of concern to everyone that every time someone tries to create more transparency, Apple shuts them down. It gives the impression that there may be a problem, and they are already aware of it.

In 2018, Apple’s average and median pay gap for employees in the UK was 12% in favor of men. This is 5 percentage points below the overall gender pay gap in the UK. The company is required to publish this data under UK law, but it does not have the same requirements in the US.

Two years earlier, Apple CEO Tim Cook told investors that women at Apple earned 99.6 cents for every dollar men earned, while underrepresented minorities earned 99.7 cents for each. dollar earned by white employees. That same year, the company released a diversity report saying it had solved the problem.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment from The edge.