The National Labor Relations Board has postponed two complaint cases against Apple, after the Trump administration hired one of the tech giant’s lawyers to be the lead attorney for the NLRB, reports the Financial Times (a subscription is required to read the article).
One postponed case regards complaints that Apple illegally restricts employee’s social media use and coercively interrogates employee who join unions. The other postponed case involves one from Janneke Parrish, who claims that Apple fired her for organizing the #AppleToo movement. Her case and another brought by ex-Apple engineer Cher Scarlett, have been indefinitely delayed.
In November 2021 ParrishParrish, a leader of the #AppleToo movement, filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company, alleging the tech giant fired her in retaliation for organizing. Parrish created the #AppleToo platform to help colleagues air their concerns with Apple’s culture of “pervasive sexism” and pay equity, according to the complaint.
In October 2021, she was fired, allegedly for failing to comply with a workplace investigation into leaks. Parrish says the company terminated her based on “false and pretextual reasons” — namely because she “spoke up regarding her personal experiences regarding workplace concerns and helped give voice to her co-workers’ concerns in a workplace where such issues have been systematically siloed, suppressed, and unaddressed.”
In November of 2021, it was announced that Scarlett, a central organizer of the #AppleToo movement, was leaving Apple and would drop a U.S. National Labor Relations Board complaint against the company after reaching a settlement.
However, she alter said that Apple attempted to get her to sign a strict non-disclosure agreement after her departure from the company. However, she told Business Insider that she was “shocked” at the attempt.
“In my mind, I should be able to say whatever I want as long as I’m not defaming Apple,” she said.
Scarlett shared the NDA that Apple offered her with Nia Impact Capital, the activist investor seeking to force a shareholder vote around transparency on NDAs at the company. On Monday, Nia informed the SEC that it had “received information, confidentially provided, that Apple has sought to use concealment clauses in the context of discrimination, harassment, and other workplace labor violation claims.”
According to the Financial Times, the NLRB has told Parrish and Scarlett that its planned trials are being postponed indefinitely, pending a legal review. Reportedly, the cases will be resubmitted to the NLRB’s “division of advice,” which assesses cases.
Crystal Carey is the ex-Apple attorney now working for the NLRB. She was the attorney representing Apple in the aforementioned cases. Carey is currently a partner at the law firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, which she joined in 2018. Prior to joining Morgan Lewis, Carey was an NLRB attorney for eight years.
The NLRB is an independent federal agency created in 1935 and vested with the power to safeguard employees’ rights to organize, engage with one another to seek better working conditions, choose whether or not to have a collective bargaining representative negotiate on their behalf with their employer, or refrain from doing so.
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