Apple Fires Snr Engineering Program Manager Ashley Gjøvik for Allegedly Violating Company Policies

Apple on Thursday fired Ashley Gjøvik, a senior engineering program manager who’s been outspoken about her experiences working for the tech giant. The reason for her dismissal was for allegedly violating the company’s policies on leaking private corporate information, because for months, Gjøvik has been tweeting openly about allegations of harassment, surveillance, and workplace safety.

Ashley Gjøvik has raised concerns that her office is in an Apple building located on a superfund site, meaning it requires special oversight due to historical waste contamination. She also says that she faced harassment and bullying from her manager and members of her team. More recently, she’s begun raising privacy concerns related to Apple’s policies on how it can search and surveil employees’ work phones.

She was placed on administrative leave in early August while Apple investigated some of these concerns — a placement she says she requested as a last resort.

A member of Apple’s employee relations team reached out to Gjøvik earlier yesterday saying the company was looking into a sensitive intellectual property matter and wanted to speak to her within the hour. Gjøvik said she wanted to keep all communications in writing, and noted she was forwarding the correspondence along to the NLRB, where she recently filed a charge. The employee relations representative responded to say that because she had chosen not to participate in the discussion, they would move forward with the information they had and — “given the seriousness of these allegations” — suspend her access to Apple systems.

Hours later, Gjøvik received an email that her employment at Apple was being terminated, effective today.

When the news about Gjøvik first broke, Apple said in a statement: “We are and have always been deeply committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace. We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters.”

Meanwhile, NLRB is investigating Apple following Ashley’s complaints and also other claims by Cher Scarlett, another Apple engineer who promoted an internal survey at Apple about the wage gap between men and women.