For a while Apple has known it was going to have difficulty getting its staff back into the office after Covid forced them to work from home.  Now it turns out that they are right, if staff do not turn up at the office to be indoctrinated by middle managers with their talk about cheese being moved, and kicking balls running, they start showing signs of individuality.

Now, it seems that senior management is set to make sure that no one thinks differently any more and they get their arses back into the office. 

As of  5 September, Apple will require its corporate workers visit the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as a third regular day that should be determined by workers and their supervisors.

Apple had decided that the third day should be a Monday, however it appears that the company is willing to extend a certain level of flexibility to its employees.

It is not as if staff had not been warned. Apple first expressed an interest in returning to the workplace back in June 2021, when it toyed with the idea of implementing a three-day-a-week policy, however rising Covid-19 cases reduced this to a two-day hybrid working policy.

Overall, Apple’s return to work policy has proven more strict that those of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google’s parent Alphabet, which have until now been fairly open to remote working setups.

In May, a group of employees published an open letter expressing their distaste and accusing Apple of being driven by a "fear of worker autonomy" and a "fear of losing control". Later, the company's head of AI made for the exit, reportedly over a connected dispute.

The Tame Apple press have rushed to defend Apple pointing out its plans remain far less strict than those of Tesla’s Elon [Look at me] Musk who told all workers to return to the office or face the sack. We would have thought that it was a sign from the universe that working for Musk was not a good idea and it was better to find an employer who was not such a Musk.