A new report says Apple employees are petitioning against the Cupertino firm’s plan to have workers return to in-office work for three days per week, beginning next month.
Last week, Apple told corporate employees that they must return to in-office work for three days a week, starting on September 5. Employees will be required to work on-site on Tuesday and Thursday, with a third in-office day being decided on by individual teams.
A new report from the Financial Times says that a growing number of employees at Apple are reportedly unhappy with the new plan, instead advocating for “location flexible work.”
A petition formed by the group “Apple Together” is reportedly making its way around Apple and gaining signatures.
The petition says that Apple “should encourage, not prohibit, flexible work” where employees can “feel comfortable to ‘think different’ together.”
A group of disgruntled Apple corporate employees wrote an open letter to the Cupertino firm’s executive team complaining about its new work-from-home policy that allows for only two days of working from home each week.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has called in-person collaboration benefits “irreplaceable” and in an email, the executive team talked about the importance of “the serendipity that comes from bumping into colleagues” during in-person work.
The employees said that Apple’s reasoning for the policy doesn’t stand up, calling the policy wasteful and inflexible, leading to a “younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied” workforce.
Pushback was not limited to lower-rung employees, as Apple’s director of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow, also resigned from the company after three years, in part due to the return-to-office policy.
Goodfellow later caught on with Google’s AI research branch, DeepMind.
