An ex-Apple employee has filed a class-action lawsuit against the business, alleging that it violated New York labor laws by paying employees every other week rather than weekly.
Plaintiff Raven Ramos filed an attempted class-action lawsuit on behalf of all Apple employees in the state of New York “that engage or have engaged in manual work in the course of their employment” on April 4, alleging that Apple has violated and continues to violate state labor laws.
Unless the New York State Department of Labor Commissioner expressly authorizes payment on a semi-monthly basis, manual workers must be paid weekly under New York law.
It’s thought that Apple didn’t get this approval for its shop employees, thus they were paid every other week instead of weekly. According to the lawsuit, Apple’s shop employees should be covered by the legislation, and as a result, Apple was breaking it.
According to the lawsuit, approximately 25% of Ramos’ work tasks might be classified as manual labor. These tasks here include working the sales floor, unboxing products, emptying cash registers, and assisting customers.
Ramos, who lives in Port Chester, worked at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store between October 2010 and January 2018. Apple, like practically every other retail firm in the United States, only paid employees every other week during that time period.
The inability to pay weekly wages is said to have damaged Ramos because “she was briefly deprived of money owing to her, and she lost the time worth of that money.
According to the lawsuit, the class includes at least 100 people, with individual claims totaling “far in excess” of $5 million.
The class claims it is entitled to recover the sum of their untimely paid wages as liquidated damages, as well as reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs, as well as pre- and post-judgment interest from Apple. The lawsuit did not provide a dollar amount for this alleged loss, although it is likely to be in the $5 million range.
Even The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights published a report in December 2014 detailing harsh working conditions at a Zhen Ding Technology facility in Shenzhen, China, which is a significant supplier of circuit boards for Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Workers are pushed into 65-hour work weeks, according to the report, leaving them so fatigued that they sleep during lunch breaks.
They were also forced to live in “primitive, dark, and filthy hostels,” sleeping “on plywood, with six to ten labourers in each packed room.” Security personnel who are always there abuse and beat the workers on a regular basis.
