121 Apple workers have until the end of January to choose.

I’m sure women will be stoked to have Apple relocate them to a state that could kill them.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    1343·
    6 months ago

    Google is dropping the Assistant team, and Amazon is dropping the Alexa team. This sounds a lot like Apple is trying to avoid an explicit layoff and forcing employees to quit instead.

    Constructive dismissal lawsuit?

    Edit: see this comment https://sopuli.xyz/comment/6157509

    • CherenkovBlue@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      35·
      6 months ago

      Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. This could have the makings of constructive dismissal. Relocate to a place with vastly different legal protections or be fired? Hmm. Since it also would possibly disproportionately affect female employees, I wonder if some discrimination could also come in to play?

      Not a lawyer, just spitballing ideas.

    • NollijEnglish
      11·
      6 months ago

      Not constructive dismissal, because the goal isn’t to place the burden on the employee. On whatever date, they will all be terminated without cause (layoff) if they choose not to relocate. There is no goal of forcing them to quit. Presumably, Apple has filed (or will file in due time) things like the WARN Act notification.

      This is a PR move to hide the layoffs from the general public, but not from the law.

    • Ullallulloo@civilloquy.comEnglish
      41·
      6 months ago

      Even if it is constructively a dismissal, you can almost never sue someone for firing you in California.

    • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren’t based on large LLMs like ChatGPT. My read: they’re thinking it’s time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      Huh. So they’re all dropping their voice assistant teams. Is this because it turns out people only ever use them as voice activated kitchen timers because it turns out talking to computers sucks, or is some worse generative AI shit coming?