The whole value proposition of a contractor is that you can onboard them quickly when you need to augment your existing staff, and can terminate them just as fast when they’re no longer needed. This is in no way a layoff or mass firing, it’s a standard contract termination that occurs all the time with tech companies.<p>The “previously assured jobs were safe” claim is ungrounded in the article, which lamely provides little more than an anonymous source mentioning an unnamed Apple employee: “One of the contractors reportedly said that Apple previously assured the workers that their jobs were safe.”
It sucks but that's the whole point of hiring and being a contract worker.<p>It's an even more tenuous position than full-time employee and frankly I think it's good that contract workers were laid off ahead of any full time workers. I'm not sure why some people are trying to frame this as bad or immoral. It's the entire point of contract workers and you know that coming in as a contract worker. It's disappointing but that's the reality of the situation.
This article references a nytimes article. This article has no regional reference for the workers.
It was recently reported that Apple was experiencing 50% defect rate in India where this newspaper seems to be from.
Could be that Apple had higher expectations.
It's unclear whether this article has any direct reporting or new information. Twice it references the New York Times, though with no link. It seems strangely written and may only be a (possibly bad) paraphrase of other articles.
No big deal here, hence they are contractors. Interesting though is the timing of this, I remember reading last week (?) about the inconsistent quality from the Indian factories could be why this was posted
And this after a few days of press from Apple fanboys about how Apple manages to avoid layoffs because they didn't over-hire. (See: <a href="https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/10/how-apple-avoided-big-techs-mass-layoffs" rel="nofollow">https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/10/how-apple-avoided...</a> )<p>Getting rid of all your contractors is a way of looking like you haven't done layoffs. (In all fairness, that's part of the deal a contractor agrees to. However many of these people were employees of a temp agency or “headshop” and weren’t necessarily benefiting financially from this arrangement.)