/ Blog / / Blog /It’s a big bummer that some people consider employees’ requests as bad and hostile but they don’t consider companies’ requirements as bad and hostile.
Employees almost always have to conform to the company’s rules, because individually, they don’t have much power. This is why unions are great: they give workers greater power by banding together to negotiate more strongly.
What I’m (unfortunately) seeing with this “Apple employees want to work remotely” issue is that people who side with Apple (rather than their employees) seem to think this is a recent issue. It is not. Lots of Apple employees have wanted to work remotely for some time.
It’s bubbling up now because of the circumstance and the solidarity amongst lots of employees across the company. Critiquing the employees’ approach feels insulting, because the approach Apple has taken all these years when employees request this is a brick wall.
In some situations, Apple has allowed flexibility for some employees to work remotely. They’ve let people work far outside the reach of Cupertino, but Apple seems only to consider it once you’ve proven seniority. I don’t think any newer employees ever have this request granted.
Side note: I once requested a shorter payment term with a very big client and I was accused of “strong-arming” them. In a working relationship between a single person and a billion-dollar company, it feels ridiculous to accuse the single person of that.
Apple employees do not typically have the upper-hand in these WFH negotiations. It’s the way Apple wants it or they can leave. And Apple can be like that if it wants to, but in this situation, Apple is strong-arming its employees, not the other way around.
So spending any time criticizing their employees for writing a letter (no matter how “poorly-written,” or how verbose, or how lengthy it is) is not just bad form, it’s only giving the two-trillion-dollar company more credence than the people who make the damn devices you love.
I have no patience left to give to people like John Gruber who want to type up how the employees are going about it the wrong way. There’s no right way. Apple isn’t going to change their remote work policy because its employees figured out the right way to approach Tim Cook.
Apple has functioned just fine in the past year. Many employees feel like they’ve done their best work this year. All Apple has to do is acknowledge that and let people work where they want. It costs Apple very little to let people work remotely. They’d probably save money.
Lots of negotiations with big companies start on their terms. As a worker, you have to constantly plead, request, and demand what you need. The company will almost always make your request sound unreasonable, like you’re being rude, ungrateful, or unfriendly.
So if you find yourself thinking that employees’ requests to their employer sound unreasonable or that they’re going about it the wrong way, ask yourself who benefits from that rhetoric. Is it the people who sit in extraordinary wealth and power? Maybe reconsider your stance.
Employment and contracts are transactions. They are negotiable. No one side should be favored. It should feel fair, and employees have as much a right to demand what they need as employers always do.