Apple to hire own security and put them on payroll

Apple plans to bring many of its security staff onto the payroll, another move that suggests Silicon Valley aims to address issues of inequality.

After a year-long review, the company says it will be hiring full-time employees to handle security at its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. "We've decided to directly hire a number of key onsite security roles for Apple's Silicon Valley operations, which are currently contract positions," said Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet in a statement.

"We will be hiring a large number of full-time people to handle our day-to-day security needs," she said. "We hope that virtually all of these positions will be filled by employees from our current security vendor, and we're working closely with them on this process."

Apple would not release how many employees would make up the security staff, but the staffing will include all the guards and workers who patrol the campus. The security employees will get similar benefits and perks that all Apple employees get, Huguet said in an interview.

This follows similar action by Google, which in October announced that it would bring its own security guards on staff.

United Service Workers West, a Calif.-based affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, had pressured Google and Apple to hire its own workers rather than use contractor Security Industry Specialists. The union protested at Apple headquarters in December.

Both moves come after extensive coverage from USA TODAY about the growing inequality, and tough working conditions, for service workers in Silicon Valley.

In other recent action, shuttle drivers for Apple and five other Silicon Valley firms including eBay and Yahoo voted Friday to join Teamsters Local 853. The union had already organized the Facebook shuttle bus drivers, which recently approved a contract negotiated by the union and Loop Transportation, the contractor that supplies drivers who ferry Facebook employees to and from work.

Apple and Google's security employment decisions, along with the movement to unionize the shuttle drivers, suggests "a new climate for working people in Silicon Valley where they can negotiate for better wages, health care and fair working conditions," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson in a statement.

While Apple and many of the Silicon Valley tech giants have workforces that are not diverse, the service workers at those companies are often minorities. Jackson, through his Rainbow PUSH Coalition, has pushed to close the racial gap in high tech.

Apple CEO Tim Cook met with Jackson in December. Apple's move today is a commitment that Cook made at the time, "and for that we are grateful," Jackson said via telephone from Selma, Ala., in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the voting rights marches there.

"In some sense what is happening in Silicon Valley coincides wonderfully with what is happening here in Alabama," he said, noting that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had also fought for worker empowerment as well as voting rights.

"This whole idea of the income gap and the wealthiest corporations beginning to work on empowering workers and their families. That is a major step in the right direction."

Jackson plans to attend Apple's shareholder meeting next week and plans to raise the idea that "when there is inclusion, everybody wins," he said.

"These workers are more able to buy a house, to send a child to school, more able to have their health funded, and to me that is the growth that we need," Jackson said. "I think Tim Cook has made a step in that direction."

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider