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:
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.