Apple to mandate three days in a week in the office by Labor Day

Apple will require its corporate employees to return to the office at least three days a week by Sept. 5, after delaying its plans several times due to COVID-19 surges.

The Cupertino tech giant will require employees to work from the office on Tuesdays, Thursdays and a regular third day that will be determined by individual teams, according to an employee memo obtained by Bloomberg on Monday.

Apple is one was of the last big tech companies to mandate employees return for three days, following Google, Facebook parent Meta and others. The move is another sign that the work week is starting to shift to a firmer schedule, albeit one that has workers in the office far less than before the pandemic. Many smaller tech companies, like Twitter and Airbnb, have instead allowed workers to stay remote forever, and some employees at big tech firms like Facebook can apply to be fully remote.

The Labor Day week plan comes about a year after companies across all industries had initially wanted to bring office employees back, but the delta variant followed by omicron severely disrupted those plans.

Some Apple workers previously protested the mandated return and called for more flexibility, writing last year that they felt “not just unheard, but at times actively ignored.”

Apple declined to comment.

Though many workers will have been away from the office for two-and-a-half years, Apple has continued to sign massive real estate leases in Silicon Valley, including a 700,000-square-foot lease in Sunnyvale last year that was one of the biggest of 2021.

Apple also recently dropped its indoor mask requirement. Santa Clara County, where its headquarters is located, reported about 30 daily coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents as of Friday, down by more than half of what was recorded during the peak of the summer surge but still higher than the 6 per 100,000 reported in May.

Roland Li and Aidin Vaziri are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com, avaziri@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf @MusicSF

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