Apple has been accused by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) of trying to prevent employees from discussing pay equity and forcing an engineer who circulated a wage survey to quit, reports Reuters.
The complaint issued by the NLRB General Counsel on Thursday is the third in a month to claim that Apple has illegally deterred employees from discussing issues such as sex bias and pay discrimination with each other and the media, including by restricting their use of social media and workplace messaging app Slack.
This is just the latest brush-up between the NLRB and Apple. Last month the trade organization issued a complaint accusing the Mac maker of violating employees’ rights to organize and advocate for better working conditions by maintaining a series of unlawful workplace rules.
In the complaint, the NLRB claimed Apple required employees nationwide to sign illegal confidentiality, non-disclosure, and non-compete agreements and imposed overly broad misconduct and social media policies.
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.
