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.
I can’t help but feel like this is their endgame with these ridiculous laws. They’re making their states so unpalatable to reasonable people that all the reasonable people leave. Everyone who remains are either “the poors” who can’t afford to go (and who they work to disenfranchise as much as possible), or people who are just as far-right as they are, securing both their own seats and presidential election votes for their candidate.
That’s kind of how I see it, especially with the culture war garbage. Being hostile to the LGBTQ community can take out a couple percent of people that almost certainly vote democratic.
Agreed. I’m interested how businesses will respond to problems like what Bumble has had. Losing that much of the workforce or seeing them all suddenly ask to go remote, switch offices etc is a huge disruption. Plus if it hasn’t already gotten hard for Texas-based businesses to find talent it will. At some point the state government will have to deal with businesses exiting the state.
It feels like this might be the only thing that gets movements from Republicans. They seem to only care and businesses
We’ll see how companies like Caterpillar feel about moving to Texas in a couple years when the Texas Legislature starts trying to bring back segregation.
Turn the whole place into post-tornado Waco? You’ve got a pretty decent point, Waco is full of wacko religious cults and is a pretty good model if you just want a bunch of educated idiots.
It takes a lot to actually take action. Many people will stay because this bad thing will most likely not apply to them. Change is hard and scary.
This seems highly suspicious.
Bumble laid off 37% of their workforce just 2 weeks ago:
If you read the article, Ms. Monteleone says:
We — since SB 8 — have seen a reduction in our Texas workforce by about a third. Those employees are choosing to move elsewhere,” she told the audience at the event. “There are a variety of laws in Texas that I think many people find incompatible with living a healthy life and being their authentic self,” added Monteleone, suggesting that not all the departures may be tied directly to this specific piece of legislation, but possibly to several other Texas laws or proposed laws that don’t sit well with Bumble’s employees.
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.
they are laying off globally
“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.
no conspiracy here. Texas just sucks
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.
These issues are even more pressing for a company like Bumble which is currently struggling with growth and appealing to a younger audience that seems less interested in dating apps than their older counterparts. The dating app maker posted a weak Q4, with a $32 million net loss and $273.6 million in revenue. It also announced it was letting go of 350 employees after other organizational shifts that saw founder Whitney Wolfe Herd stepping down as CEO and a shake-up in the C-suite, which included the appointment of former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones as its new CEO.
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.
I was looking for some additional info to see if bumble is helping employees with these moves and found this instead: Austin-based Bumble to lay off nearly a third of its workforce.
So… I guess OPs article is still true, but maybe the cause is a bit different than we were led to believe? Suggestion is a helluva drug.
The original article mentions these layoffs as distinct from the relocation of a separate third of the workforce away from Texas.
You can read how they are mentioned in the last paragraph of the article, and then see how Bumble’s Interim General Counsel, Elizabeth Monteleone, discusses the relocations as related to the heartbeat bill in the rest of the article body.
I think you probably just missed that part of the article. Still, consider editing what you wrote, because it is misleading and implies that this is an attempt to use the layoffs for political aims.
Tell me you didn’t read OP’s article without telling me you didn’t read OP’s article.
But I did read it. Please let me know where you find wording that directly ties the abortion ban as the result of people leaving the company. It’s all innuendo.
My point in looking further in the first place was, I wondered even if a third of people wanted to leave the state (which I don’t doubt), how could they all really afford to pick up and move? This wasn’t addressed in OPs article- which is why I went looking in the first place.
“Bumble has lost a third of its Texas workforce in the months since the state passed the controversial abortion SB 8” is not mutually exclusive from, “we let a third of our workforce go after SB8.” It’s just the first version cats the blame elsewhere, IMO quite dangerously. I get why they did it, they are campaigning for women’s reproductive rights. But it’s this kind of disingenuous language that gives talking points and counter claims to proponents of the law.
Please tell me you’re susceptible to an inflexible belief system despite contrary evidence without telling me you’re susceptible to an inflexible belief system despite contrary evidence.
If ypu live in Texas move.
I know that you would have to pay me much more to work for a company based on Texas or Florida. Even if I was remote primarily I wouldn’t even want to visit
And yet it is smaller companies like Bumble that are the first to put their money and reputation on the line to fight against laws like this while juggernauts like Facebook, Google, Oracle, Apple, SalesForce, Tesla, etc. encourage Texas politicians to stay in power at all cost.
Ironically you’d get paid less money for working in Tx or FL. Most companies I know scale worker pay to cost of living in different areas. A job in Silicon Valley might pay 30% more than the same job in Austin. I think a lot of people anticipated a brain drain from these red states as they pass more and more restrictive legislation.
Especially when you’re talking places like tech companies and academia, you’re going to find overall that the employees skew left. They’re going to be among the first to go. Similarly, people in medicine who might be directly impacted by these idiotic laws will have both the motivation and the incentive to move.
There’s a couple of factors at play. First, there’s a lot of logistics and inertia involved. Even if they don’t have family in the area, there’s a ton of planning. Some of it you can sort of just through money at, but other things like kids and school take a bit more planning. Second, this is a tough time in the market for tech and for housing. People are going to be more financially conservative as a result. Also, at least some of the most egregious laws have been modified or stated by the courts.
So it’s not going to look like Dunkirk or the fall of Saigon, but I bet we will be able to tell in about five years that there was a demographic effect.
