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Two Apple store staffers, who say they are fed up with out-of-hours bag searches, are suing the iPhone giant for compensation.

The pair's class-action lawsuit claims the Cupertino company is bent on preventing "employee pilferage" and forces workers to wait in a queue for up to ten minutes to have their handbags or "personal package" checked.

Bags are inspected after work or during unpaid breaks, but Apple did not recompense staff in overtime for the minutes of rummaging, the blue-shirts alleged in their filing with San Francisco's federal court on Thursday.

The unhappy Apple wage slaves claimed that the "improper uncompensated security check policy" added between 50 and 90 minutes of unpaid minutes to their working week - and this was just a "conservative estimate".

The two workers, who were named in the filing as Amanda Frlekin and Dean Pelle, claimed the rules cost them about $1,400 a year. They want Apple to hand over this cash. The filing claimed that the bag search policy was in operation across the company's shops in America, which employ roughly 42,400 people.

The legal paperwork claimed: "Apple hourly employees are forced to wait in these lines and undergo lengthy, off-the-clock security screenings before they are allowed to leave the premises. This work, done primarily for the employer's benefit, is time which Apple hourly employees should be, but are not compensated for, both straight hours and overtime hours worked in excess of 40 hours a week or, in California, in excess of eight in a day."

Cooknote

Having found a non-soggy beermat to scribble on, El Reg worked out that if Apple CEO Tim Cook was stripped of his share options and forced to stand in line for a similar amount of pocket-rooting time each day, he would be owed about $3,028 in overtime every single week.

Last year, Cook took home a basic salary of $1.4million and a bonus of $2.8million, so that's a $4.2m (£2.76m) package not including the $413m (£271m) in shares he's promised if Apple performs well until 2021. So, last year, if the hardworking bigwig clocked a 40-hour week, Cook earned about $33.65 a minute, which is much better than the symbolic $1 a year the late Steve Jobs earned as chief exec.

(NB: There is no such thing as statutory paid leave in America - firms don't need to pay staff during vacations, sick leave or other holidays. But let's assume Cook wanted a bit of a break from Cupertino and the fruity firm was willing to generously pay him to stay off work on all 11 federal holidays plus whatever time he booked off with the family.)

So if Cook needed to stand in line for the security check, he would potentially be missing out on more than three grand every single week - if anyone dared poke around in the biz baron's "personal package" for a hidden fondleslab, that is. ®

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