On the eve of debuting the iPhone 6 in retail stores today, Apple announced that it will not unlock most iPhones for the government. But don't mistake those rallying outside the South Coast Plaza Apple Store this morning as pro-Apple freedom lovers. Actually, they are there to “educate customers about big tech's economic toll on struggling service workers who contribute the industry's success.”
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Supporters and members of SEIU United Service Workers West–who represent more than 40,000 janitors, security officers, airport workers and other property service workers across California–point to recent Wall Street Journal and USA Today articles that reveal big tech companies in Silicon Valley are creating a growing “invisible workforce of minority workers who clean, guard, maintain and cook on tech campuses every day, often for poverty-level wages and without benefits.”
These labor advocates also point to Apple's iPhone products having generated more than $70 billion in revenues in 2014 alone–and call for a major readjustment of “the country's grave economic imbalance by making sure all workers who contribute to the industry's success have good, family-supporting jobs.”
Activists will be at 20 locations today around the country, including–starting at 11:30 a.m.–the Apple Store in the portion of South Coast Plaza that's west of the bridge over Bear Street, or what used to be known as Crystal Court (3333 Bear St., Costa Mesa).
Surely you can get directions to there on your you-know-what.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.