Apple Employee Wants to Unionize

Taking a bite out of Apple

​There's a great scene in The Social Network where Andrew Garfield's character, Eduardo Saverin, storms into the Facebook office, picks up Mark Zuckerberg's laptop, and sends him a strong message by shattering it.

That's the sort of scene we imagined when word got out that a part-time Apple employee in San Francisco has been attempting to unionize his fellow workers. 

In fact, it is exactly what we would expect from an innovative Apple employee.

Yet Cory Moll, 30, has a much more composed approach, compared to the enraged Facebook employee who had just learned he'd been ousted from the multibillion-dollar company he helped to create.

Moll's quiet revolution began to unravel on Jan.y 1. "Happy New Year! Our Time Has Come," he tweeted. Five months passed before a second entry appeared: "Happy 10th Anniversary, Apple Retail Stores!"

Since then, his efforts to start a union have been slow-moving, yet he is not giving up. He created an Apple Retail Workers Union Web site, which states: "At Apple, our most important resource, our soul, is our people. Our Time Has Come."

"It's kind of a feeling of David versus Goliath," Moll told reporters.

Don't get him wrong. Moll says he loves working for Apple, where he makes $14 an hour, which is $4 more than San Francisco's minimum wage. Perhaps that explains why he is not more vociferous about his union plans. After all, it is seemingly rare, if not unheard of, for a well-treated employee at one of the major high-tech giants in Silicon Valley to express discontent.

But Moll told reporters that, as a part-time employee since 2007, he has struggled to get full-time status. While the union is in its "infancy stages," people are starting to pay attention.   

"I'm not sure if I see it becoming a full global union like Industrial Workers of the World, or store by store like a traditional union like the UFCW or the Teamsters. That's very far off in terms of what it's going to look like," Moll told CNET. "Initially, it's just to get people talking about it, and explore ways to do away with the problems that are happening at our store."