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 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.