NYC Pension Fund-Led Group Strikes Deal With Apple on Workers’ Rights to Organize

Tech giant agrees to publish independent assessment on employees’ rights to unionize.


A group of investors led by New York City’s pension fund system has reached an agreement with Apple under which the tech giant will conduct an independent assessment of the company’s compliance with its commitments to its workers’ rights relating to organizing and collective bargaining. [Source]

The assessment will also review Apple management’s practices when employees seek to exercise their rights to form or join a union. Under the agreement, Apple will publicly release the results of the assessment by the end of the year.

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The coalition of investors, which collectively own approximately 53 million Apple shares worth approximately $7.2 billion, includes Trillium ESG Global Equity Fund, SOC Investment Group, Parnassus Investments, Service Employees International Union Pension Plans Master Trust and the Greater Manchester Pension Fund.

“Workers organizing at Apple for a collective voice in their workplace have reported strong pushback from the company—that flies in the face of Apple’s stated human rights commitment to workers’ freedom of association,” New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said in a statement. “I’m grateful to Apple’s board of directors for listening to the concerns of shareholders regarding worker rights and hope the company will heed the findings of the third-party assessment.”

The agreement comes as Apple employees have increasingly called for unionizing at its stores in the U.S. In June, workers at an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, formed the company’s first retail union in the U.S. after a vote to unionize. It also follows a shareholder proposal filed by the coalition in September that originally called for the assessment.

The New York City Comptroller’s office said there have been “numerous reports” of Apple’s interference with its workers’ freedom of association in organizing efforts. It noted that as of August 25, 2022, the National Labor Relations Board was investigating 14 charges of unfair labor practices involving the company.

In its shareholder letter, the coalition said that since 2021, Apple employees have accused the company of using “intimidation tactics to deter organizing, including one-on-one manager meetings, captive audience meetings, retaliatory firings, and threats of reduction or elimination of benefits.”

The letter also said that the “the apparent misalignment between Apple’s public commitments and its reported conduct represents meaningful reputational, legal, and operational risks, and may negatively impact its long-term value.”

Representatives from Apple did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.

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Recessions May Be Mild, but Market Reactions Aren’t

BlackRock forecasts a 1% economic contraction this year. The question: How will investors respond?

 


Market damage often exceeds a recession’s damage. Whether that recurs this year is a grand conundrum.

Wall Street is buzzing with disagreements over whether 2023 will produce a soft landing (no recession), a bad recession or a mild recession. And the predominant view is that it will be mild. The latest entry in the mild camp is asset management titan BlackRock. A BlackRock research paper predicts that a contraction in gross domestic products of just 1% will hit the U.S. in the second and third quarter.

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The economic downturns since 1990 have been small, with the nasty exception of the Great Recession of 2007 through 2009, history shows. Still, the market reactions to these recessions, however harsh the economic damage was, have been tough. So that leads to the question of whether stocks will get slammed in any upcoming GDP drop.

In the Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, the economy slumped 4.7%. Over that spell, which included a global financial crisis, the S&P 500 lost 58%. Before that, the 1990 Gulf War recession featured a mere 1.5% GDP shrinkage and a 20% market dip. The 2001 dot-com recession’s economic toll was even lighter, just 0.3% down, but a whopping 51% stock dive.

What about the brief pandemic recession of early 2020? The economy plunged 19.2%. The market got skewered worse, off 32%. This period was an anomaly, as both economic and market problems quickly disappeared. Rapid fiscal and monetary stimulus levitated both the economy and stocks quickly.

The argument that stocks might not suffer too much in a mild recession rests on the theory that the present situation also is anomalous. One big reason: Households still have a lot of savings left over from COVID-19’s onset. Also, this bullish scenario goes, 2022’s market wipeout, with the S&P 500 falling 19%, might mean that the 2023 recession already has been priced into stocks. That’s the contention of Vanguard Group’s CIO, Gregory Davis, which he put forth last fall.

The opposite side is that 2022’s market behavior was fed by high inflation and interest rates, which were a shock to the system—and a recession is a whole new disaster.

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