A new report from The New York Post points out that Apple dismissed “hundreds of outsourced workers” in recent days — which may indicate that the company has been terminating contracts since August last year, as noticed by journalist Mark Gurmanyes Bloomberg.
As explained in the article, these are “workers employed by outside agencies who work alongside Apple employees on projects”. While Apple could have simply waited for those contracts to expire, it opted to “fire the contractors immediately” as a “stealth move to cut costs”.
The scale of these layoffs is not yet clear, but it would not have been premeditated. One such employee claimed to have been “taken aback”, saying that Apple management had assured him that all jobs were “safe”. It’s unclear, however, whether the company has been laying off continuously since last August or whether this is some “second round” of layoffs.
Still, anonymous sources say that some third-party employees have complained that they are treated as “second-class citizens”, in addition to being deprived of benefits such as health insurance.
Apple has a large number of contract workers on teams like tech support and customer service. The company also relies heavily on service providers for analytics services/features like Apple Maps and Siri.
It is worth noting that the Big Techs as a whole have faced a period of mass layoffs; the CEOChief executive officeror executive director.”>1 da Maçã, however, confirmed that Apple is slowing the pace of hiring, so the company “wants to manage costs in other ways”, other than through layoffs – which probably does not include third-party employees, notably.
via 9to5Mac