Apple Employees Not Quite Ready To Quit Working From Home In Their Pajamas
That seems reasonable, however “Internet entrepreneur" Jason Calacanis mocked Apple employees' concerns. He tweeted: “175K+ a year & they won't come in 3 days a week to a $4b building with free food." Yes, Apple's corporate headquarters cost an estimated $5 billion, which is probably not as relevant to the staff as it is to the global corporation that doesn't want its four-story, 2,800,000 square foot building (called the “spaceship") to sit empty. This is a concern for a lot of businesses stuck with expensive leases, but there's a nationwide housing shortage. Some of the individual offices are larger than a studio apartment.
It's also not surprising that employees with six-figure salaries wouldn't consider free food a major incentive. They can buy their own kettle corn and fruit smoothies. If Apple has a surplus of free meals, the company could help out with Silicon Valley's increased demand for food assistance during the pandemic.
NBC News Senior Business Correspondent Stephanie Ruhle was also fed up with the ingrates at Apple.
Twitter
Ruhle tweeted on Saturday:
“If you don't want to go back to your super rad job at Apple, no need to revolt ... just quit. Someone else will gladly take your job."
Politely requesting better working conditions isn't a “revolt." The job at Apple could be “super rad" or even “totally tubular," but the flexibility of remote work is priceless, especially if you're a working parent. Schools haven't fully reopened, so all these announcements from corporations have big “cart before the horse" energy.
The New York Times ran article last month titled “Will Schools Open In The Fall?" Parents are still clinging to vague questions about in-person schooling instead of more helpful declarative statements.
Many schools and day care centers have not returned to normal operations. They are open for only a few hours a day, a few days a week or on alternating weeks, making it difficult for parents to return to a full-time job. And parenting responsibilities still fall disproportionately on women.
This situation is unlikely to change over the final month or two of the current school year. But it raises a major question about the start of the next school year, in August and September: Will schools fully reopen — every day, Monday through Friday, and every week?
The Times notes that if whatever currently passes for schooling continues into the fall, it will exact a heavy cost on working mothers, because everything fucking does.
Ruhle, a true woman of the people, doesn't understand or respect the many legitimate reasons people might want to continue working remotely. Many employees at Silicon Valley companies moved in search of larger, more affordable homes during the pandemic. It was a major lifestyle change, which was mutually beneficial because companies could safely continue operations.
Some businesses have tried to hide behind BS stats claiming remote work resulted in a drop in productivity. That's hardly a fair comparison when working parents were also part-time schoolteachers.
Ruhle's position isn't smart business, either. Apple offered lots of perks, sure, but if the flexibility of remote work is the most appealing benefit for top talent, employees will look elsewhere.
Apple's announcement amounts to an easing of restrictions compared to its previous company culture, which famously discouraged employees from working from home prior to the pandemic. Yet it's still more conservative compared to other tech giants. Both Twitter and Facebook have told employees they can work from home forever, even after the pandemic ends. Sure, the Apple Park campus is beautiful and offers every material comfort, but so did The Village on The Prisoner.
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Georgia Schoolchildren Will Just Have To Learn All History From Confederate Statues
Georgia's state Board of Education this week became the latest government entity to take a firm stance against teaching about racism in schools, or at least against teaching anything that makes white Republicans uncomfortable. The Georgia Board of Ed adopted a resolution insisting that the USA and Georgia are definitely not racist places, while calling for limits on how public schools should be allowed to discuss and teach about racism.
The resolution itself — authored by National Review writer and professional culture warrior Stanley Kurtz, author of many serious works of scholarship like Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism — calls for supposedly colorblind educational practices that will not "indoctrinate students in social, or political, ideology or theory" or "promote one race or sex above another," and how could anyone possibly object to that? Like, unless you apply those concepts very selectively and in bad faith, or are actively letting Stanley Kurtz decide what is "isms," but only a cynic would suggest rightwing officials could be capable of such a thing.
