Apple fires at a slow fire
Meta, Google or Twitter they are laying off employees by the thousands. Apple, for its part, has not been forced to do without so many people, since during the pandemic it expanded its workforce by significantly fewer than the other companies. Fewer employees and more economic performance per worker equals far fewer layoffs. Now that we have this context, let’s see what happens with your contractors.
The 9to5Mac portal echoes a report in which it is explained that Apple, although “it has largely avoided layoffs at the scale of Google and Meta”, the company “has fired hundreds of contractors”. They make it known that the original report has been published in the New York Post, and they mention that the workers that Apple is laying off are hired through external companies that work with Apple. They are not, therefore, layoffs of workers who work directly hired by the company, unlike what happens with the massive layoffs of “big tech”.
Likewise, 9to5Mac explains that “the magnitude of the layoffs is not clear.” There is not, therefore, a defined number of workers to which Apple has terminated the contract with the outsourced company. The report only says that those affected are “hundreds”. And everything indicates that it is a measure by Apple to save costs.
“Apple has a large number of contract workers in teams like technical support and customer service. Also heavily dependent on contractors for things like the location of products and services” report from 9to5Mac.
But it’s not the first time this has happened.
A Bloomberg report, published in August 2022, publicly exposed that Apple was making moves to slow down recruitment processes and save on costs. In the same way, they announced that “around 100 contractors” were fired in just one week, in that same month of August 2022.
Unlike the other corporations, the laid-off workers are not directly hired by Apple. Similarly, the number of workers is significantly lower. Taking into account that companies like Saleforce or Meta have almost doubled, and even doubled, their workforce during the pandemic, Apple barely increased it by 20%.
Even the economic performance that Apple obtains for each worker is much higher than that of the other “big tech”. These two factors are what have caused Apple not to have to make thousands of layoffs, since in this situation we are talking about a few hundred workers. And even though jobs are destroyed in both cases, any of the other companies individually far exceed the jobs lost on these two occasions when Apple has laid off contractors.
