#AppleToo starts publishing employees’ toxic workplace stories

A group of current and former Apple workers recently banded together and called for colleagues to share stories of discrimination, harassment and retaliation they’d experienced within the company. As of August 27th, the group called #AppleToo said it has collected 500 such stories — now, it has started publishing them on its official Medium page. Cher Scarlett, an Apple security engineer and the face of the movement, wrote on Medium that she will share five stories at a time “as the emotional toll in reading these is heavy.”

Two of the first five are about sexual harassment, one of which involved a male boss using his position of power over a female employee. Later, that employee was kicked out of an interview after the hiring team realized who she was. Another story was from a Black retail worker in the UK who tried to get their bosses to do something about racism and micro aggressions in the workplace to no avail. A female employee talked about how she was targeted by a person in her team and how management didn’t do anything about it. And the last one is about an employee who was assaulted in her store by a customer and didn’t get support from management. 

If Scarlett publishes all the submissions she got, these are just five of the many we’ll get to read. The #AppleToo movement said on Twitter, however, that 75 percent share a common theme: They involve some form of discrimination. Nearly half of them involve sexism, retaliation and HR reports that were ultimately dismissed. A fourth of them involved racism and ableism, and most of the harassment and assault stories were sexual in nature. 

In an interview with Protocol, Scarlett said she feels “like the company needs to be held accountable because they’re not holding themselves accountable. People want to feel heard. And they don’t feel heard by Apple.” She added that some employees who’ve been with the tech giant for decades felt like leadership used to listened to them, but that’s no longer the case. 

When the news about the #AppleToo movement first broke, Apple said in a statement: “We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters.”