APPLE’S AUSTRALIAN EMPLOYEES PLAN TO GO ON CHRISTMAS STRIKE OVER PAY

Fri 23  December 2022:

Australian Apple employees have started a strike in protest of poor working conditions and pay, which might hurt the tech giant’s sales during the busy Christmas shopping season.

The Australian Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) had earlier this month scheduled a statewide walkout from Apple retail stores on December 23 at 3 p.m. local time (04:00 GMT), with plans to be absent all of Christmas Eve.

The launch of the strike on Friday comes in the wake of the tech giant facing disruption at its flagship iPhone plant in China owing to rare workers’ protests against severe COVID rules in the country and poor handling of the situation at the factory.

Earlier in June, Apple workers in Maryland, United States, became the first retail employees of the tech giant to unionise in the country as workers continued to criticise the company’s working conditions.

RAFFWU, which is at the forefront of the strike, claims an eight-year-old agreement denies workers “weekends, consecutive days off, set rosters, set days of work, 12-hour breaks between shifts, overtime rates,” among others.

“The 2014 agreement is one such agreement which pushed workers below the legal minimum,” the union alleged, demanding the iPhone maker immediately return to the table and negotiate a fair agreement.