The truth is that Cook’s actions have not always been those of an unfailingly good and decent man. On his watch, for example, Apple’s treatment of retail and support employees has come in for severe criticism. At one meeting, Cook himself declined to answer questions submitted by the AppleToo activist group, whose leaders understandably said they did not feel heard.
The company has reportedly blocked pay surveys, likely breaking the law; it has discouraged unionization and, coincidentally or not, closed the first U.S. Apple Store to achieve this. Conditions in Apple’s Asian supply chain, of course, are a serious issue.
On the other hand, all the things above were true when Cook took the top job, and while he hasn’t solved them, he has tried. Apple published a list of suppliers for the first time in 2012, months after he became CEO; in 2020, he put a major supplier on probation for breaking the company’s code of conduct. Apple’s environmental record, while still far from perfect, vastly improved under the tenure of Lisa P. Jackson, whom Cook hired in 2013 until she retired earlier this year. We even got to enjoy/endure the CEO bantering with Mother Nature at the iPhone 15 launch event.
To be clear, many of the reforms we’ve seen in the Cook era have been forced on him by regulators or bad PR, but there remains a sense that while Steve Jobs, for one, would have refused to give in, Cook is more conciliatory. It also appears that Cook has far more of an urge to do the right thing than his famous predecessor. In 2014, the Mac Observer reported that he responded angrily to a shareholder question about whether focusing on sustainability was good for the company’s bottom line. “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI,” he said. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.” It takes a lot of courage for a CEO to go after the shareholders.
