The petition works through a specific legal mechanism. CERCLA — the Superfund toxic waste dump clean-up law — includes a provision, § 105(d), that lets any person petition EPA to assess a site for the National Priorities List. And here's the important part: once you file, EPA must respond. The statute gives the Agency twelve months to either complete a "preliminary assessment" of the site, or send the petitioner a written explanation of why it won't. EPA doesn't get to shrug. Congress built this provision specifically so ordinary people could force the government to look at contaminated sites it was ignoring.

So in February 2026, I started that twelve-month clock. We're now around the six-month mark so I sent EPA Region 1 a formal status inquiry asking where things stand. Within a day, I got two written answers — one from the Superfund program, one from EPA's enforcement lawyers.

The Superfund program answered first. EPA has assigned a Site Assessment Manager to my petition: Mandy Liao of Region 1's Superfund and Emergency Management Division. A Site Assessment Manager is the EPA staffer who shepherds a site through the Superfund evaluation pipeline. 

Ms. Liao's response confirmed that:

• EPA is actively reviewing the petition. In her words, EPA is "reviewing the Petition for Preliminary Assessment" and "currently evaluating the Site...".
• EPA acknowledged the deadline, in writing. The twelve-month statutory clock runs out on February 13, 2027. If EPA decides an assessment is warranted, that's the completion date. If EPA decides it isn't, the Agency committed to sending me its reasons in writing by that same date.
• No decision yet, either way. The site hasn't been entered into EPA's Superfund database (called SEMS) and the formal assessment hasn't started. EPA is at the threshold stage and promised to notify me once it decides what to do next.

The EPA has now confirmed in writing that it's bound to this process and this deadline. By February 13, 2027, one of two things happens: EPA assesses the site, or EPA explains itself. Both are formal agency actions. Both give Boston an answer it has never had. And if the explanation doesn't hold up, I can take it to a federal judge.

​When I filed the CERCLA petition, I also served a Notice of Intent to File a Citizen Suit under the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act lets private citizens sue polluters directly in federal court — but first you have to send a notice and give the government a window to bring its own enforcement case. If the government steps up and "diligently prosecutes" the violations, the citizen suit is off. If it doesn't, the courthouse doors open.

So my status inquiry also asked: has EPA brought any enforcement action on the violations in my notice? The Superfund team kicked that question to EPA's Office of Regional Counsel, and Jeff Kopf, Senior Enforcement Counsel for Region 1, answered in writing:

1. No. EPA has not commenced any enforcement action under the Clean Water Act with respect to my notice. For citizen-suit purposes, that's the answer that matters — there is no government prosecution standing in the way.
2. I also asked whether EPA had referred the matter to the Department of Justice or the Army Corps of Engineers. On that one, EPA declined to answer, citing its "long-standing policy" of not disclosing the existence of ongoing referrals.

Notice what that second answer isn't. It isn't "no." EPA could have simply said no referral exists. Instead it invoked the policy it uses to protect referrals that do. Draw your own conclusions.

When I served my citizen suit notice, I voluntarily extended the standard sixty-day waiting period to a full year to accommodate the year-long CERCLA process. If I have to take this matter to court myself, I'll likely bundle the claims.

Now the petition has a named Site Assessment Manager, an active review, and a written deadline. That's the process I extended the clock for, and it's happening.

Between now and February 13, 2027, I'll post updates here as things move. If EPA completes the assessment and the site scores the way I expect, the South Bay heads toward the National Priorities List — the first Superfund site in Boston's history. If EPA declines, I get a written explanation, and I already have the citizen suit noticed, preserved, and ready to file.

Either way, this is now on the record, on a clock, and in writing — which is exactly where I want it.

- Ashley 

Read the emails with US EPA Region 1: ​

Read more in the Petition and the dedicated South Bay pages: South Bay/Boston Marsh

Statement of Ashley M. Gjøvik, Charging Party, NLRB Case 32-CA-282142

Five years ago, when I raised concerns about toxic chemical exposure in an Apple office, Apple's managers and "Employee Relations" told me — and by example, told every Apple employee — to stay quiet. Today, Apple has signed a federal settlement agreement with the National Labor Relations Board promising, in writing, that it will never do that again.

Under the settlement, Apple must post and email a federal Notice to Employees stating — in Apple's own signed words — that:

• WE WILL NOT tell you not to speak with others about your working conditions, including your workplace environmental health and safety concerns.
• WE WILL NOT tell you to use a "balancing test" — to make sure information is complete and accurate, doesn't cause panic, and makes no assessment about safety — before you talk to coworkers about health and safety.
• WE WILL NOT tell you to come to us first before communicating your health and safety concerns to others.
• WE WILL NOT direct you to refrain from talking with other employees while you are on administrative leave.
• WE WILL NOT impliedly threaten you with discipline for talking with other employees about working conditions.

Read that list again. Every line corresponds to something Apple actually did in 2021 — by phone, by email, by video call — according to the federal complaint the NLRB's own prosecutors issued after a multi-year investigation. In 2021, Apple told a worker that talking about workplace safety was a "warning." In 2026, the federal government made Apple put the opposite in writing.

This is Apple's second NLRB settlement arising from my charges. In 2025, Apple was required to rescind unlawful confidentiality and employment policies nationwide (Case 32-CA-284428). Together, these settlements establish, on the public record, what Apple workers have always known and what Apple spent years denying: you have the legal right to talk to each other — about pay, about safety, about working conditions, about your leave, about your workplace — and no NDA, no policy, no manager, and no "Employee Relations" script can lawfully take that from you.

To every Apple employee who was told to stay quiet, who watched what happened to those of us who spoke up, and who thought twice before posting in that Slack channel: this Notice is for you. I signed the settlement — but I also filed a formal Statement with the NLRB, because this settlement does not go nearly far enough.

The case was gutted before it was settled. In September 2025, the NLRB withdrew the heart of the complaint — my unlawful suspension and termination — along with reinstatement, backpay, an apology, expungement, and mandatory training for Apple's managers. My appeal was denied this May purely on "prosecutorial discretion" grounds, with no ruling on the merits. My objections to that gutting are now incorporated into the settlement record.

One bulletin board is not a remedy. Apple's violations were committed by phone, email, and video, against remote employees, and were reported around the world. The settlement requires a paper posting next to a locker room in one building in Sunnyvale, plus an email to one team. The NLRB's own 2024 complaint demanded posting at all Apple facilities and on Slack, intranet, and email, plus training. The prior settlement in my other case was nationwide. I've asked the NLRB to explain why workers this time get a notice most affected employees will never see — and to require nationwide electronic posting or a reading of the Notice by a senior Apple executive.

Apple is a repeat offender. Federal settlement standards require considering a company's history of labor violations. Apple's recent record — the nationwide policy settlement, retail store cases, and multiple charges from other employees over the same 2021 events — should have produced a stronger remedy, not one of the lightest the agency offers.

The NLRB's General Counsel used to be Apple's defense lawyer — on this exact case. The current General Counsel of the NLRB, Crystal Carey, appeared as counsel of record for Apple, in this case, while at Morgan Lewis — her name is on the government's own service list from December 2024. She now runs the office with final, unreviewable authority over the case, and the office that would hear any appeal. I have formally asked the NLRB to disclose, on the record, whether she is recused, who actually made the decisions to shrink this case and approve this settlement, and how future compliance decisions will be walled off from the conflict. Workers are entitled to know whether the referee used to play for the other team — because in this case, she literally did.

I signed because Apple workers deserve this Notice now; not after more years of litigation. But make no mistake: a company worth trillions of dollars violated federal labor law, admitted nothing, and was asked for a piece of paper and an email. My civil case and Department of Labor proceedings continue, fully preserved. The evidence the government gathered remains available. And every Apple employee now has a signed federal document to point to the next time anyone at Apple suggests they should stay quiet.

The settlement agreement, Notice to Employees, complaints, and my filed Statement are available below.

- Ashley Gjovik 

Today I e-filed a consolidated position statement and umbrella memorandum with the National Labor Relations Board, Region 32, in support of all ten of my pending unfair labor practice charges against Apple Inc. (Case Nos. 32-CA-381277, -381430, -381499, -381754, -381967, -382501, -382742, -383738, -384065, and -384770). The filing consolidates what has, until now, been told in ten separate charge cover letters into a single account — because it was always a single course of conduct.

In April 2025, Apple signed a national settlement agreement with the NLRB (Case 32-CA-284428). In it, Apple promised to rescind and stop enforcing the overbroad confidentiality rules it had used against employees — including me — to the extent those rules covered wages, hours, and working conditions. The settlement includes a self-executing default provision: if Apple violates it and doesn't cure within fourteen days of notice, the original complaint is reissued, Apple's answer is deemed withdrawn, every allegation is deemed admitted, and the Board can enter a full remedy without a trial.

Within months of signing, Apple rebuilt the same restrictions through a different vehicle: the confidentiality-designation mechanism of a protective order in my civil retaliation lawsuit. At my December 2025 deposition, the moment I invoked the NLRB settlement on the record, Apple's counsel declared everything I said going forward "confidential" — ultimately about 72% of my testimony about my own working conditions and my own complaints.

What followed, between February and April 2026, was a coordinated enforcement campaign by three of Apple's outside law firms across three federal forums: demands that I delete published posts and commit to future silence; a letter banning me from every Apple property on Earth, forever (walked back to a single address one day after I filed a charge about it); motions seeking sanctions, gag orders, and the sealing of my NLRB charges from the public docket; and threats of sanctions and pre-filing restrictions in my own Chapter 7 bankruptcy case — with my NLRB charges expressly listed, by name, as the supposedly "vexatious" conduct justifying it all.

Then the district court ratified the mechanism. In June 2026, it granted Apple's motion to retain its confidentiality designations, kept seventeen entire docket entries under seal — including my NLRB charges and the NLRB settlement agreement itself — and ordered me to "de-publish" my own already-published speech about my own working conditions, along with "all other publications and republications of that same material." In July, the district judge personally ordered my compliance. And in August, Apple took the position that the orders are now final and unreviewable: the district court supposedly can't revisit them because they're on appeal, Apple "reserves its right to object" to the Ninth Circuit reviewing them, and my request that Apple state the factual and legal basis for each individual redaction is, in Apple's words, impermissible "relitigation." Apple alone decides what is secret, and no tribunal may ask why.

The NLRB does not answer to the district court on questions of federal labor law — it's the other way around. Under San Diego Building Trades Council v. Garmon, whether an employer may restrict employee speech about working conditions, and whether it may retaliate against an employee for filing Board charges, are questions committed exclusively to the Board. The district court never applied the National Labor Relations Act; it applied Rule 26(c), a discovery rule. Board decisions are reviewed by the federal courts of appeals — not by district-court discovery orders.
​
And under Bill Johnson's Restaurants v. NLRB and BE&K Construction v. NLRB, an employer's litigation loses any petitioning protection when it pursues an objective that is illegal under federal law — enforcing restrictions a Board settlement rescinded, punishing an employee for filing charges, imposing gag terms the Board has held unlawful even to propose, sealing Board charges from public view, and disabling an employee's ability to participate in Board proceedings. That exception applies regardless of whether the employer wins in court. No judicial success can launder an unlawful objective. So Apple's court victories are not a defense to these charges. They are the evidence — the measure of how far the mechanism got before anyone with jurisdiction over the labor question weighed in.

The filing asks Region 32 to:

• Invoke the settlement's default provision — issue the fourteen-day non-compliance notice, and if Apple doesn't cure, reissue the October 2024 complaint with all allegations deemed admitted, as Apple agreed in writing;
• Issue a consolidated complaint on all ten charges;
• Seek a Section 10(j) injunction so that Apple cannot keep enforcing the designations, deletion demands, and sealing positions against my protected activity — or my ability to give evidence to the Board — while the case is decided;
• Order the remedies the Board imposed in Pain Relief Centers: withdrawal of every litigation position with a preempted or unlawful objective, and reimbursement of the costs of defending against them; and
• Order rescission and notice — including notifying the district court and the Ninth Circuit that the designations and related orders were procured and enforced in violation of the Act and the settlement.

If this mechanism stands, every NLRB settlement in the country is optional. Any employer can sign one, then obtain a protective order in any lawsuit with any employee, designate the employee's testimony about her working conditions as "confidential," treat her Board charges as violations of that designation, get the charges sealed, get her speech deleted, and then administer the whole regime from behind a wall of "finality" that it claims no court can look past. The confidentiality rules the Board ordered rescinded come back — this time backed by the contempt power of a federal court.

The Supreme Court said in Nash v. Florida Industrial Commission that Congress wants people with information about unfair labor practices to be "completely free from coercion against reporting them to the Board." That principle either means something or it doesn't. This filing asks the Board to say it does.

My appeals are pending in the Ninth Circuit: one from the June 2026 judgment, and a second (No. 26-5331) from the confidentiality, sealing, and de-publication orders, with my opening brief due November 6, 2026. The Board's process runs independently of both — which is exactly the point. Nearly a year will have passed between the deposition gag and the first appellate briefing. The Board doesn't have to wait, and its own settlement gives it a remedy that requires no new trial at all.
​
The full consolidated position statement is available below.

- Ashley Gjovik 

Case update: Gjovik v. Apple Inc., N.D. Cal. No. 3:23-cv-04597-EMC; Ninth Circuit appeals pending. Everything discussed below comes from the public docket, which you can read for yourself on CourtListener. The views here are mine — I'm the plaintiff, and these are some of the arguments I am making on appeal.
​
The district court case ended with a judgment on June 24, 2026 (Dkt. 390), which is now on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. But a second dispute — about secrecy itself — kept going after the judgment, and it has now produced its own appeal (Ninth Circuit No. 26-5331). That dispute is about whether hundreds of pages of my court filings, largely describing my complaints about my working conditions at Apple, can be sealed from public view, and whether I can be ordered to "de-publish" my own speech about my own case.

Here's the short version of how we got here, all from the public docket:

• In early 2026, Apple moved to seal roughly twenty of the filings in the case — including oppositions, declarations, and even a Request for Judicial Notice consisting of public records (Dkt. 340). The documents were sealed in their entirety, provisionally, in April (Dkt. 355).
• After the case was already over, a magistrate judge granted Apple's motion to keep its confidentiality designations (Dkt. 396, June 29, 2026). That order also directed that the previously sealed filings "remain sealed," and ordered me to "de-publish" material.
• The order's entire description of what is actually confidential is a single category: my deposition testimony about Apple's "internal code words and descriptions of internal product-related studies." (Dkt. 396 at 6.) It does not identify which portions of which documents contain that information.
• The district judge declined to disturb that ruling (Dkt. 398, July 16, 2026) — but, notably, ordered the parties to meet and confer about applying "limited redactions" to the sealed filings, because even Apple had told the court that entire documents should not stay sealed.
• I appealed. Twice, protectively, to make sure nothing slipped through a procedural crack (Dkt. 399, Dkt. 403).

So as of today the filings remain 100% sealed, months after a court acknowledged only "limited redactions" were warranted, and the question of what the public gets to see is being worked out — if you can call it that — in a "meet and confer" process between me and the company that wanted the secrecy in the first place.

Follow the sequence, because each step is stranger than the last.

Step one: seal first, specify never. Sealing a court record is supposed to work in exactly one order of operations. The party who wants secrecy identifies the specific content, explains with particularity why each piece meets the demanding legal standard, and the court makes specific findings before anything is sealed. That's not my preference — it's the Ninth Circuit's rule and this district's own Local Rule 79-5, which requires sealing requests to be "narrowly tailored" to sealable material, identified item by item. Here, entire documents were sealed wholesale, and the operative order defines the confidential content only as a one-sentence category.

Step two: the company that demanded secrecy can't find it. When the court ordered the "limited redactions" process, Apple — the party that filed the sealing motions, supported by sworn declarations — reported that it needed weeks to conduct a "careful and diligent review of nearly 1,000 pages" to locate the confidential information. Sit with that. The confidential content that justified sealing a thousand pages was, by Apple's own account, so hard to find that Apple itself needed a month-long expedition to locate it — months after it swore the documents warranted sealing.

Step three: the redactions arrive with no explanations. What Apple eventually produced was a set of highlighted pages. No index. No indication of which highlights quote the designated testimony and which are "indirect references" (Apple's phrase). No explanation of how any particular highlight falls within the one-sentence category. When I asked for a per-redaction basis — the kind of itemized chart this district ordinarily requires for any sealing request — Apple refused, and told me the burden was on me to identify each redaction I disputed and justify my disagreement, after which, in Apple's own words, "Apple will then consider your response before making a final decision about whether to retain or remove the redaction."

Read that again. In a dispute about the public's right of access to court records, the party seeking secrecy has appointed itself the final decision-maker.

Step four: no court will say who decides. Meanwhile, the jurisdictional picture is a hall of mirrors. Apple's position, filed publicly (Dkt. 406), is that the district court retains jurisdiction to "supervise" the filing of redacted versions — but cannot actually adjudicate anything about the redactions, because the orders are on appeal. The district court's latest order (Dkt. 407) sets a deadline for the meet and confer and says disagreements should go to the magistrate judge — while noting that whether the magistrate or the district judge would even have jurisdiction over such a dispute "may turn on the specifics of the issue." So: the redactions must be worked out now; the court that issued the orders won't construe them; the party that benefits from secrecy claims final decision authority; and the question of which judge could review any of it is expressly unresolved.

The result is a system with no adult in the room — except the one with the trillion-dollar market cap. My position, stated to Apple in writing, is simple: I am not the arbiter of Apple's redactions and I will not pretend to be. The burden of justifying secrecy belongs to Apple at every stage. Apple can file whatever redacted versions it believes it can justify, those choices will be Apple's alone, and the Ninth Circuit can review what this process actually produced.

The appeal isn't about hurt feelings over process. The orders are wrong under multiple independent bodies of law, any one of which requires reversal.

The public-access doctrine. Court records are the public's records. Under Kamakana v. City & County of Honolulu, 447 F.3d 1172 (9th Cir. 2006), sealing anything more than tangentially related to the merits requires "compelling reasons supported by specific factual findings" — and conclusory assertions of harm don't count. Foltz v. State Farm, 331 F.3d 1122 (9th Cir. 2003), requires a particularized showing as to specific documents; blanket designations under a stipulated protective order prove nothing. An order that seals a thousand pages in their entirety on the strength of a one-sentence category, with no document-specific findings, inverts every element of this doctrine. The months-long fight over what the order even covers is itself the proof: an order that complied with Kamakana would have answered that question on its face.

Improper delegation of a judicial function. Deciding what the public may see in a court file is a judicial act requiring judicial findings. What has happened here instead is that the court issued a category and left the interested corporate party to determine, unilaterally and after the fact, what the order sealed — with Apple declaring in writing that it will make the "final decision" on each redaction. Whatever else that is, it is not an Article III court administering the public's right of access. The redacted documents that eventually appear on the docket will have been scoped entirely by the party that sought the secrecy, with no judicial review of a single specific redaction. That structural defect infects every redaction regardless of its content.

Prior restraint. The order doesn't just seal documents — it commands me to "de-publish" material I already published about my own case. An injunction forbidding and unwinding speech is a prior restraint, which comes to any court "bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity." Prior restraints are the most disfavored remedy in American law, tolerated only in the most extraordinary circumstances, on the most specific findings. There are no such findings here — there couldn't be, when the order doesn't even specify what content it reaches.

Labor law. The sealed filings are, at their core, an employee's complaints about her working conditions and her employer's conduct — the heartland of activity protected by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act. And California has spoken directly to this: the Silenced No More Act (Code of Civil Procedure § 1001; Government Code § 12964.5) embodies the state's explicit public policy against instruments that restrict workers from discussing unlawful workplace conduct. Orders that operate to gag an employee-plaintiff's accounts of her workplace disputes sit in direct tension with both federal labor law and California's declared policy — a tension the orders never acknowledge, let alone resolve.

Public records cannot be secret. Among the sealed filings is a Request for Judicial Notice composed of public records. Information already in the public domain cannot satisfy any sealing standard, under any test, in any circuit. That entire documents of this character have now spent months under seal tells you everything about how much scrutiny the sealing requests actually received.
What happens nextOn my side: the district-court process is complete. I initiated the court-ordered meet and confer, pursued it for over a month, proposed a concrete protocol with deadlines, and asked Apple to state the basis for its redactions. Apple declined. I have stated my final position and reserved everything for appeal. Apple will file its redacted versions; whatever it chooses to black out, it chose alone.

Then it goes to the Ninth Circuit, where the opening brief in the sealing appeal is due this fall, and where the questions finally get asked in the right order: What, specifically, was found to be sealable? By whom? On what evidence? And who gave a litigant the power to decide what the public may read in a public court file?

I'll post the briefs when they're filed. The full docket, including every order discussed above, is public on CourtListener.

— Ashley M. Gjøvik

RESIDENTS AND ADVOCATES TO RALLY AT SANTA CLARA CITY HALL OVER APPLE’S SECRET CHIP FAB NEXT TO HOMES, PARKS, AND A CHILDREN’S SCHOOL

Press conference precedes City Council meeting; follows amended federal lawsuit seeking to shut down hazardous semiconductor plant at 3250 Scott Blvd, Santa Clara, California.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Community members, labor advocates, and environmental activists will hold a press conference and rally on Tuesday, August 18, outside Santa Clara City Hall (1500 Warburton Avenue), ahead of that evening’s City Council meeting, to demand the City stop protecting an unmarked, high-hazard semiconductor fabrication plant (“chip fab”) operated by Apple Inc. at 3250 Scott Boulevard — directly across the street from the 1,840-unit Santa Clara Square Apartments, public city parks, children’s playgrounds, a church and Whole Foods, and the San Tomas Aquino/Saratoga Creek.

WHO: Ashley Gjovik, former Apple senior engineering program manager, environmental whistleblower, and plaintiff in Gjovik v. Apple Inc., City of Santa Clara, et al.; community members; labor and environmental advocates.

WHAT: Press conference and rally regarding the federal environmental citizen suit seeking to shut down hazardous operations at the chip fab — followed by attendance and public comment at the Santa Clara City Council meeting.

WHEN: Tuesday, August 18, 2026. Press conference and rally at 6:00 PM; City Council meeting begins at 7:00 PM. Attendees are encouraged to arrive at 6:00 PM and stay through the Council meeting.

WHERE: Santa Clara City Hall, 1500 Warburton Avenue, Santa Clara, CA 95050 (rally outside; Council meeting in the Council Chambers).

CAN’T ATTEND IN PERSON? The Council meeting is a hybrid meeting — join and speak during public comment via Zoom:

• Zoom: https://santaclaraca.zoom.us/j/99706759306 (Meeting ID: 997-0675-9306)
• By phone: 1 (669) 900-6833
• Watch only: livestreamed on the City’s Facebook (facebook.com/cityofsantaclara) and YouTube (youtube.com/cityofsantaclara) channels

Supporters joining remotely are encouraged to sign on by 7:00 PM and speak during the public comment period. Full participation instructions: santaclaraca.gov > City Clerk’s Office > Watch and Participate in Public Meetings. (https://www.santaclaraca.gov/our-city/departments-a-f/city-clerk-s-office/city-council-meetings/watch-and-participate-in-public-meetings)

My public comment and public presentation slides.