Apple’s harassment policies are getting slammed by British judges.
This week, a U.K. employment tribunal judge found that Apple unfairly fired an analyst at its London headquarters, Christoph Sieberer, for taking secret photos of a woman coworker, The Telegraph reported. The judge said Apple’s harassment policies were “vague” and that “there were no reasonable grounds” for firing Sieberer.
Just a few weeks prior, in late June, another British judge said Apple unfairly fired another employee — this time for making racist comments. The judge said that, because Apple didn’t have a zero tolerance policy in place for discrimination and harassment at the time, the tech giant didn’t have grounds to fire the offender, Timothy Jefferies, who worked in one of its London stores.
According to court documents reviewed by Bloomberg, the employee fired for racist comments, Timothy Jefferies was saying goodbye to a colleague when he turned to a Chinese coworker and said, “as long as you lot don’t release another deadly disease on the world.”
While the judges implied that the tech giant must make its rules clearer before firing its employees for violations, they seemed to favor the employees who’d been dismissed.
“In this case there was ample evidence that there was a culture in the repair room which embraced explicit language and some jokes which may be considered inappropriate, whether they referred to race or other sensitive issues,” the judge said in their ruling on the Jefferies case.
Apple has looked to clamp down on discrimination and harassment in recent years after it came under fire for failing to address such issues. Apple also began allowing employees to speak freely about incidents of discrimination and harassment in 2022, which it previously barred under concealment clauses in employees’ contracts.