Grindr Tells Unionizing Workers: Move Across The Country or Be Fired
Grindr Tells Unionizing Workers: Move Across The Country or Be Fired
Two weeks after workers at the company announced a union drive, Grindr management has issued a return-to-office policy that workers say is retaliatory.
Companies that force people into the office will see a brain drain that won’t go away until they start paying a lot more. This in-person premium will make offices even more costly.
PROGRESSIVE, but not really like that on issues that matter... Classic american liberal, they want the money AND the guilt. Fuck your labour peasant.
I feel like there’s some cosmic irony about a gay dating app not supporting their workers that I quite can’t put my finger on
Equality means you get to be exploited like the rest of the peasants 
Unfortunately, yeah.
Even companies that cater to the LGBTQ+ community, which is all about equality, treat their workers like garbage. There seems to be no incentive for any corporation to actually be decent to their employees, no matter how liberal their social views might be or appear to be according to corporate image or culture. I guess there aren't enough protections for workers and nobody cares, just as long as they can scroll through somebody's workout pics and try to hook up with them. (Oh yeah, I'm brutally sarcastic sometimes)
Capitalism necessitates that the product and the profit are always the most important thing. We'll never really get rid of this issue until we remove the profit motive, and we'll never really see the full view of capitalism without accepting that these corporations don't care about their workers or their customer base at all. They never will, because that doesn't impact profit. They will feign empathy and sincerity until they have met their quarterly profit goal, and the public will clap and say "wow, finally somebody fights for us!" And continue to consume.
Exactly. That was my point. However, Grindr just doesn't fit into my life, mostly because I tend to reject superficial stuff for the most part. I don't reject frivolity, but the whole dating app thing kind of makes me throw up a little. It's like gay.com was, only more modern. Anyway, "dollar voting" is a total sham that bourgeois podcasters blab about on their smarmy podcasts and write about on their maketeering blogs when they discuss their recent "retail therapy" outing. You don't vote with your dollar, or with the app you scroll through. You vote when it's election time. People are voting for things to just keep on chugging along as they have been: treat workers like garbage, make healthcare expensive and inaccessible, alienate the queer people, alienate anybody that isn't white, etc. It would just be so nice if all the people using Grindr would delete their accounts all at the same time and delete it from their phones. It isn't going to happen, but don't you dare keep me from making fun of my friends at the bar that get all in an uproar over their Grindr bullshit. I make fun of them. I laugh at them. I call them names. Over drinks. Then they tell me I'm just a you-know-what. And I laugh, and I say, "how many no-shows last week, babe?" You see, in the big picture, why yes, it's all about the political economy, how the system works, etc. In the little picture, in the personal day to day things of living an individual life, it's about sticking to your guns and having a personal code of what you will do, what you will not do, and what you have a conscience about. So, onward everyone! With your conscience!
Don'take the mistake of thinking Grindr cares about the community. They're a company that saw an unexploited market demographic and capitalized on it. That's all they are.
Yes, I realize that. However, they don't even care about their image. Why don't they care about their image and how the people who use their app see them? Perhaps the people who continue to use their app are either A) indifferent or B) uninformed. I went out last night and talked about this situation (you know, at the LGBTQ bar where all we LGBTQ people go) and I got a lot of indifferent attitudes about it. I got an equal number of attitudes that expressed concern, but some of them expressed concern as they were checking their Grindr notifications on their phones. I think it's time for us - the ones who care - to band together and burn it down.
That six months severance is looking pretty nice. I have to imagine a good chunk of staff are going to take it regardless of their distance to the office. Sure hope Grindr learns a tough lesson on this one.
Grindr needs a new legal team. They're gonna get reamed for this one:
What is considered an “unfair labor practice?”
In Section 8 of the NLRA, there are a number of illegal activities that are considered “unfair labor practices,” or ULPs. ULPs are illegal whether they are engaged in by employers or by unions.
A few examples of what is considered an “unfair labor practice” are: (1) interfering with, restraining, or coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed by the NLRA, (2) dominating or interfering with the formation or administration of a labor organization (3) discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any condition of employment to discourage membership in a labor organization
Examples of Employer Conduct Which Violate the NLRA Are:
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Threatening employees with loss of jobs or benefits if they join or vote for a union or engage in protected concerted activity.
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Threatening to close the plant if employees select a union to represent them.
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Questioning employees about their union sympathies or activities in circumstances that tend to interfere with, restrain or coerce employees in the exercise of their rights under the Act.
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Promising benefits to employees to discourage their union support.
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Transferring, laying off, terminating or assigning employees more difficult work tasks because they engaged in union or protected concerted activity.
The biggest fuck up here is that one of the offices they're telling the employees to move to doesn't even exist yet:
“It's not even a well-drawn-out plan,” said McGee, who mainly works out of their home in New York City. “They have not told us where the office in the Bay Area is going to be. If this was indeed planned for months as they're claiming, why isn't there a lease? They’ve sublet a WeWork space that I would wager, given the WeWork space that we have in New York, is not big enough for the entire product design team that they've told to move to California. So where do they expect us to be working?”
This would be the equivalent of transfer and plant closure, couched in "return to office" speak. The fact that they did it immediately after the union organizing effort doesn't speak well to their chances in court.
All good points. However, the question comes down to "How much money can they throw at legal to make the problem go away?" Way more than the employees who're getting the short end of the stick, that's for sure.
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Grindr has developers?
The whole app feels like it just spontaneously came to existence.
If they treat their employees like this they'll soon scrape the bottoms of the barrel.
I hope they all take the severance pay. But please ilm the CEO when he learns that he is the last one working there.