UTAW Members at Cambridge Apple Store ask for union recognition

Grand Arcade joins a growing number of Apple Retail Stores globally that are organising, including White City and Southampton, where workers have also requested voluntary recognition through UTAW and faced considerable pushback and union-busting from management.

Apple’s response has followed a familiar and predictable pattern seen internationally. Managers have conducted one-on-one meetings with staff to interrogate them about union involvement, while offering extra hours as an incentive. All-hands “captive audience” meetings have been held to spread misinformation about unions, and a small number of anti-union workers are encouraged to speak out regularly.

Apple attempts to portray UTAW as a meddling external organisation disrupting the so-called “family” dynamic between employees. They frame unions as “businesses” trying to exploit Apple’s workforce for profit. A union could lead to losing out on pay or benefits. A union might negotiate you a worse deal. A union might lead to you receiving pay increases and benefits later than other employees. A union can’t actually affect all the things they want to change.

In 2022, Apple hired the notorious “union-avoidance” firm Littler Mendelson in the US — a law firm previously involved in union-busting at Starbucks and McDonald’s. The Verge reported on this move, which signalled how seriously Apple was preparing to resist worker organising. In 2024, the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) awarded a settlement to Apple retail workers represented by our sister union, the Communication Workers of America, after a manager unlawfully interrogated a worker about union support. Reuters covered the ruling. The behaviours ruled on by the NLRB represent more than a passing resemblance to the playbook Apple have deployed in the UK.

Apple’s day-to-day union-busting tactics in the UK aim to slow things to a crawl — delaying meetings with union reps, creating the illusion that nothing is happening. Phrases like “do your own research” are used to sow doubt and delay decisions, echoing the rhetoric of conspiracy theorists, pseudoscience promoters including the followers of the far-right QAnon conspiracy. Apple also flaunts its “Solicitation and Distribution” policy to discourage workers from talking about the union or distributing materials at work. While legally they cannot enforce this against protected union activity, the implication alone is intended as a threat to deter activists.

For all the effort Apple has put in to union-busting, it continues to refuse to engage with the real issues workers want to raise. Retail staff routinely face disciplinary action for disability-related absence, often caused by the company’s failure to implement reasonable adjustments. Managers are poorly trained, leading to unfair disciplinary procedures and harsh sanctions. Apple use an employee forum called the ERT as a sham union proxy to consult and inform workers on changes to roles without providing those reps with an agenda prior to meetings or the opportunity to raise concerns. And chiefly amongst all these issues, Apple doesn’t recognise the huge contribution that individual retail workers add, who receive bog-standard retail wages in exchange for individually contributing hundreds of thousands of pounds each in revenue every year.

All of this amounts to a hostile, toxic work culture for workers, emblematic of the issues that workers want to resolve in the first place. All of this is abundantly obvious to workers at Apple Grand Arcade who have prepared to face these tactics. They routinely identify and share the actions that Apple is taking. Blatant union-busting like this wont work. If anything it strengthens the resolve of our members and only further demonstrates the need for a real worker voice in the form of a worker-led trade union. That's what we're building at Apple, and we won't back downUTAW Members at Cambridge Apple Store ask for union recognition

The reps at Apple, Cambridge