Apple won’t have to stump up the cash for back-paying thousands of current and former employees at Apple Stores across California, according to the ruling of a federal judge.
The lawsuit was brought against Apple in 2013 by two former retail employees — claiming that Apple’s policy of mandatory bag searches after work had cost them dozens of hours of unpaid wages, totalling around $1,500 per year.
The complaint became a class action suit in July this year, meaning that Apple could potentially have had to compensate 12,000+ current and former employees at its Californian retail stores.
The reason the judge let Apple off the hook? Because there was nothing stopping employees from not bringing a bag to work.
“Apple took a milder approach to theft prevention and offered its employees the option to bring bags and personal Apple devices into a store subject to the condition that such items must be searched when they leave the store,” said U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup in San Francisco.
The decision follows a similar ruling last December, decreeing that Amazon didn’t have to pay employees for time spent waiting in security check lines.
Via: CNET
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
