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.
It’s not as certain as you might think. Ever heard of log cabin Republicans?
Log Cabin Republicans are a joke. It’s like 3 guys who share the same humiliation kink and an obsessive hatred of taxes.
I have. And they are a small minority of the LGBTQ community that Republicans have been more than happy to get rid of without much of an hit to their numbers.
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.