After Google and Amazon, Apple is now faced with employees who publicly complain about abuses in the company.

A group called "#AppleToo" accuses the group of a "persistent pattern" of unequal treatment on a website that it launched, which manifests itself in racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.

Apple has escaped the public eye for too long.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

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The group complains that they tried unsuccessfully to initiate changes in all possible internal channels, for example through management or the HR department. "For many Apple employees, the culture of secrecy creates an opaque, intimidating fortress," it said.

The AppleToo group seems to be manageable so far, according to a report by the industry publication The Verge, 15 current and former employees are directly involved in the organization. Still, the initiative is remarkable, especially as it fits in with a number of employee movements in other companies in the technology sector. At Google, for example, a group called “Google Walkout for Real Change” formed three years ago to organize a major employee strike. The trigger at the time was Google's handling of sexual harassment in the workplace, but the protests were also directed against other alleged grievances.

Earlier this year, activism at Google took on a more formal character when a union was formed. Internal resistance has also spread at Amazon. A group called “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” asked the company, among other things, to become more committed to climate protection. That year, employees at an Amazon distribution center in the US state of Alabama voted to form a union. There was no majority for this, but there were protests against the tactics of the company in its campaign against a union, and it is possible that there will be a new vote. The reason for the vote was dissatisfaction in parts of the workforce with the working conditions in the camp.The technology industry is traditionally considered to be very anti-union territory.

It is not yet clear what goals Apple employees are pursuing and whether they might seek to found a union. On the website, colleagues are called upon to share their experiences, from which a catalog of requirements for Apple should be developed. One of the initiators of the movement recently carried out an internal survey among employees, which indicated differences in pay between men and women in the company. The Apple group received expressions of solidarity from the initiators of the Google employee movement. Meredith Whittaker, an artificial intelligence specialist who was one of the spokesmen for the Google strike at the time, tweeted about the “sad, familiar culture” of discrimination in the technology industry while looking at AppleToo.