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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it and doesn't cure within fourteen days of notice, the original complaint is reissued, Apple's answer is deemed withdrawn, every allegation is deemed admitted, and the Board can enter a full remedy without a trial.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:
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 
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AuthorUpdates from Ashley Gjovik about her whistleblower battle against Apple Inc. Archives
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