Apple in November settled a long-running lawsuit over employee bag checks, with the Cupertino company agreeing to pay $29.9 million to employees who were subjected to off-the-clock bag searches, and now details about the settlement are available on Apple's website.
California employees first sued Apple in 2013, and in 2015, the case escalated into a class action lawsuit. Employees claimed that Apple subjected them to mandatory bag checks that were "embarrassing and demeaning," with those checks conducted after the end of a shift, causing employees to stay at work an extra 10 to 15 minutes.
Apple said that its bag searches ensured that employees were not hiding stolen electronics in their personal belongings. Apple claimed that employees who did not want to be subjected to bag searches could simply avoid bringing a bag to work, but this argument ultimately did not work for Apple and in 2020, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Apple needed to pay the employees for the time they had spent in bag searches.
Apple and lawyers for the Apple employees in California reached a settlement last year and in November, asked a judge to approve it. Apple has agreed to pay nearly $30 million, and the more than 14,000 workers involved in the lawsuit will receive payments based on the individual shifts worked. Current and former employees will be receiving emails and letters from Apple with specific information about their potential payment amount.
Details about the Apple Bag Check Class Action Settlement can be found on Apple's legal website, with documents available for California employees subjected to bag checks between July 25, 2009 and August 10, 2015.
The bag search policy has been long discontinued and Apple has not conducted bag searches since 2015. The Final Approval Hearing for the settlement will take place on July 7, 2022.
Top Rated Comments
1. Not everyone drives to work. Lots of retail employees take public transit to work, especially if they are students.
2. Lots of retail employees work multiple jobs. They may not have time to return home between shifts, whether they have a car or not. Students often go right from work to school.
3. Some medications need to be kept cold or require injections, making “carry it in your pocket” an impossible request in some instances. Medications often need to be taken at regular intervals, which don’t take the constantly shifting schedules of retail employees into account.
4. A good manager knows when shifts end and should be prepared to do a bag check in a timely manner.
5. Apple already has cameras all over their stores and can monitor employee behavior easily, making bag checks a waste of time.
6. iPhones and other easily stolen high-value devices check-in for activation before use and can easily be checked for a sales history. (This isn’t rocket science, by the way. Video game console serial numbers have been tracked at purchase for over two decades)
7. Apple customers can walk into a store, scan a product on the floor, and walk out without interacting with a single employee. Apple would not allow this if they didn’t have good floor monitoring practices.
8. Back room inventory can and should be kept under tight control, limiting the need to check bags for anyone working on the floor.
9. Lockers or safe storage space could be provided for employees and monitored as part of shrink protection.
TL;DR: Your opinion is, at best, uninformed. Do better.