{"id":277316,"date":"2026-06-25T00:04:30","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T00:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/277316\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T00:04:30","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T00:04:30","slug":"apple-just-closed-its-first-unionized-u-s-store","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/277316\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple Just Closed Its First Unionized U.S. Store"},"content":{"rendered":"

Four years ago, Apple employees in Towson, Md., voted<\/a> to become the first unionized Apple Store in the United States. On Saturday, the company closed the location, citing \u201cdeclining conditions\u201d at the mall that houses it.<\/p>\n

The union representing the workers accuses Apple of retaliating against the Towson employees because they unionized.<\/p>\n

The closure was announced in April, and Apple also shuttered two nonunionized stores on Saturday. The union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, noted in filings to the National Labor Relations Board that employees in the nonunion stores had been given the option to take similar positions at nearby stores. But Apple required the Towson workers to apply for jobs the way typical applicants would, without an easy transfer to another location.<\/p>\n

Partly because of this, more than half of the Towson store\u2019s roughly 70 unionized employees will be terminated on Wednesday. \u201cI\u2019m really sad,\u201d said Billy Jarboe, an operations lead at the store who also served as its chief union steward. \u201cI\u2019m in the grieving and mourning phase now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apple said in a statement that it was following the collective bargaining agreement it had reached with the union in 2024, which doesn\u2019t automatically entitle workers to a similar position at a nearby store under such circumstances, but does grant workers up to 12 weeks of severance pay. The company acknowledged that workers at the two other closed locations had been offered transfers.<\/p>\n

The company strongly denied the union\u2019s claims of retaliation and said it would \u201ccontinue to abide by the agreement that was negotiated and agreed with the union.\u201d In recent years, other prominent retailers have also closed locations<\/a> at the mall, known as Towson Town Center.<\/p>\n

Workers at the Towson store voted to unionize in June 2022, frustrated over safety concerns related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Many also complained<\/a> about a longer-term decline in the quality of their jobs as the company took steps to generate more revenue through its retail locations. Some employees who had not been directly involved in sales said that they had been increasingly drawn into sales work.<\/p>\n

When the two sides agreed<\/a> on a labor contract in the summer of 2024, many of the most concrete gains appeared modest at best: Towson employees largely received the same benefits as those in nonunion stores, along with raises of roughly 10 percent over three years for the typical worker. Apple appeared to match or exceed the union wage increase at nonunion locations last year.<\/p>\n

But the contract also brought certain protections that had not been available in nonunion stores \u2014 like a cap on the number of temporary workers \u2014 and, perhaps more important, appeared to demonstrate that employees could unionize without risking their livelihoods. Some employees and union officials expressed confidence that the contract could prompt other stores to follow suit.<\/p>\n

But labor experts say the closure of a unionized store and the termination of its employees typically have the opposite effect. \u201cHow could they not have a chilling effect?\u201d said Wilma Liebman, a chair of the National Labor Relations Board under President Barack Obama. \u201cIt\u2019s an awful lot of work to get a union, and then this happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Liebman said that while it was legal for employers to shut down unionized locations for economic reasons, it was illegal if the purpose was to discourage unionization at other locations. She said that such a motivation could be difficult to prove, but that allowing nonunion employees to transfer while denying that right to union employees could help the union prove its case.<\/p>\n

There are nearly 300 Apple Stores in the United States, and workers at several other locations have explored unionizing over the past few years. One other store, in Oklahoma City<\/a>, has also unionized.<\/p>\n

Eric Brown, a sales lead at the Towson store who was also a union steward there, said many employees from the store had applied for jobs at other Apple locations but had not been hired.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four years ago, Apple employees in Towson, Md., voted to become the first unionized Apple Store in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17666,91696,3532,9,11,10,81499,24631,3277,106593,60874],"class_list":["post-277316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-apple-inc","tag-international-assn-of-machinists-and-aerospace-workers","tag-national-labor-relations-board","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-organized-labor","tag-shopping-and-retail","tag-shutdowns-institutional","tag-towson-md","tag-workplace-hazards-and-violations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}