Bag-Search Lawsuit Against Apple Inc. Dismissed

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Apple’s employees at its retail locations brought a class-action lawsuit against the company in 2013 in which they were demanding to be paid back for the time they spend waiting in line on a daily basis for mandatory bag searches. On Saturday, a federal judge threw out the lawsuit.

Employees can chose not to bring bags

William Alsup, the U.S. District Court judge in San Francisco, freed Apple from the liability of paying compensation to more than 12,000 current and former employees at its retail stores in 52 locations throughout California for the time they spend waiting to get their bags checked when they go on breaks or leave at the end of their shifts.

Alsup mentioned in the ruling that employees not willing to go through the search process could stop carrying a bag to work, thus avoiding the search process. The judge sees it as a better solution than Apple restricting its employees from carrying bags and purchased Apple products into the store altogether.

“Apple took a milder approach to theft prevention and offered its employees the option to bring bags and personal Apple devices into a store subject to the condition that such items must be searched when they leave the store,” Alsup said.

Apple settles second employment lawsuits

Two former Apple workers at its retail stores in New York and Los Angeles brought the retail employees’ lawsuit in 2013, claiming that the employees were required to stand in lines for up to 30 minutes daily so that store managers could check their bags to make sure they were not smuggling stolen goods.

The employees claimed that adding these hours totaled to dozens of unpaid hours or amounts to $1,500 per year. In July, the case got class-action status. Alsup’s decision comes a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Amazon wasn’t required to pay any compensation to its employees for the time spent in security check lines.

This is the second employment lawsuit in the past two months that Apple has resolved. The first was an anti-poaching civil lawsuit filed against Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe which accused them of conspiring not to hire each other’s employees. For the settlement of the case, all the four companies agreed to pay $415 million. The lawsuit, which was filed by the former employees of the four tech giants, throws light on the practices of some major tech industry players which allegedly reach a secret agreement of not poaching each other’s employees.

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