Bumble has lost a third of its Texas workforce in the months since the state passed the controversial abortion SB 8 (Senate Bill 8), also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, over a year ago. This new data point was shared by Bumble’s Interim General Counsel, Elizabeth Monteleone, speaking on a panel this afternoon at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The panel focused on the “healthcare crisis in Post-Roe America” and featured women who had both sued and spoken out about the need to have doctors, not politicians, involved in their healthcare decisions.
This seems highly suspicious.
Bumble laid off 37% of their workforce just 2 weeks ago:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/bumble-to-cut-37-of-jobs-plans-app-overhaul-to-revive-growth
If you read the article, Ms. Monteleone says:
Not a word about their decision to cut their own workforce – some of them are surely part of that “reduction in our Texas workforce” (note how she doesn’t say they transferred to other locations, or left the company of their own free will). I guess their huge layoff happened “since SB 8”? cough
It sounds like they are trying to do damage control, by spinning their layoffs into a narrative about TX reproductive medicine laws.
Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to see big companies like Toyota, JP Morgan, and USAA give the finger to Texas. But I don’t think Bumble is being honest about this, and I don’t think they constitute a blip on the radar of the TX economy.
The article is poorly written. Bumble lost a third of its “Texas based workforce” is technically true. That said, most of those employees didn’t leave the company, they just left the state. Mentioned in the article is how Bumble is now a “remote work first” company. The way the article is written it makes it sound like a third of Texas staff quit in a year, which isn’t what was said in the panel. Add to that the last paragraph of the article which notes that the company has since had to layoff 350 employees due to slowing demand for dating apps amongst younger people but fails to mention that 350 is a third of the company, and the whole message becomes muddy and suspect.
In a single article, two key facts are misrepresented.
There’s nothing to suggest your theory has any merit. And they are laying off globally, so no, this simply is not an attempt to control some narrative.
Not to mention their claims regarding employee turnover are entirely realistic. Who’s to say the loss of workforce is not itself a cause for failing to meet their growth predictions, which of course corpos “solve” by firing more people.
But, no, they’re making things up whole cloth because there aren’t actually any ill effects from Texas enacting regressive, authoritarian bull****.
No, there’s no conspiracy here. Texas just sucks.
“Globally” presumably includes Texas.
Obvs, I don’t have any insight whether they laid off Texas employees at any greater or lesser rate than their global rate, but “a reduction in our Texas workforce” is completely vague, and could refer to layoffs or voluntary departures.
It’s possible that they are trying to distract from the layoffs, AND Texas just sucks. The two are not exclusive.
Did you finish the article? It has a whole paragraph about their decision to cut their own workforce.
Yes, the article mentions it. Ms. Monteleone did not (at least, among items attributed to Ms. Monteleone).
The article is not speaking for Bumble. Ms. Monteleone IS speaking for Bumble.