Judge approves Apple’s $30.5 million settlement over employee bag checks

A federal judge in California has signed off on Apple’s $30.5 million settlement in a lawsuit that alleged the company shortchanged some 15,000 retail workers by not paying them for time spent in “bag checks” after their shifts.

Daniel Wiessner for Reuters:

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco approved the settlement in the 2013 class action on Saturday. The California Supreme Court in 2020 used the case to rule that state law requires employees to be paid when they go through mandatory security screenings.

Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are also among major U.S. employers to face similar lawsuits. Amazon and a staffing agency last year agreed to pay $8.7 million to 42,000 warehouse workers to settle one of those cases.

The plaintiffs in Apple’s case claimed retail workers often waited several minutes after clocking out, and sometimes longer, to have their bags checked before they could leave the stores where they worked.

MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in February 2020:

Is this some leftover policy from John Browett’s short shift as head of Apple Retail? We ask because this seems like a policy some discounter would implement, not the world’s most valuable company which literally has so much money coming in that they don’t know what to do with it.

If you are requiring employees to do something, regardless of what it is; mundane or revolutionary, then you should pay them for their time. This seems like basic logic.

Paying employees for time spent in bag checks seems like something Apple should have realized and done from the outset. Not only is it wrongheaded PR (the world’s richest company asking retail employees to donate their time daily for bag checks, seriously?), it’s just immoral, not to mention illogical. It’s a cheapskate mentality in the most expensive and profitable retail spaces in existence. Yet, Apple is fighting it in court? Come on!

Let’s get real, Apple brass: Stop being cheap, end the appeals, settle, apologize, and pay up. Then figure out how to smooth the current bag check process so it costs your employees less time and, therefore, the company less money. You know: innovate.

Again, we understand the need for bag checks. Apple should keep requiring bag checks for retail employees. The company simply needs to fairly pay their employees for the time spent during the mandatory activity.

Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!

Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]