Many bosses have demanded, requested, or wheedled their staff to return to the office over the past year, often to minimal effect. The CEO of LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr delivered an abrupt return-to-office ultimatum—and gutted the company’s staff.
Last month, Grindr gave its all-remote staff two weeks to pledge to work from an office two days a week starting in October or lose their jobs come August 31. Many declined to return: 82 out of 178 employees—46 percent of the staff—were let go after rejecting the mandate, according to the Grindr union, which went public two weeks before the ultimatum. The policy would have forced many of them to relocate to Los Angeles, Chicago, or San Francisco.
The purge has dealt a blow to Grindr’s unique queer-friendly workplace culture, which employees say was a rarity in tech. Some union members are accusing the company of hypocrisy for asking LGBTQ+ staff to abruptly abandon their support networks in a political climate that has seen homophobic and transphobic attacks surge.
Today the Communications Workers of America, which represents the employees, filed two unfair labor practice charges with the US National Labor Relations Board against Grindr, accusing the company of unlawfully suppressing discussion of working conditions in company chats and through an agreement that terminated employees were offered in exchange for severance pay. The board can issue remedies such as revoking portions of that agreement or making the company agree not to prohibit such speech in the future.
Grindr offered a relocation stipend to remaining employees, and six months of severance pay to those who did not commit to in-office work. Company spokesperson Sarah Bauer says that the return to office plan was unrelated to workers’ decision to unionize. “We respect and support our team members’ rights to make their own decision about union representation,” she says.
Bauer says that Grindr began transitioning from remote-first to hybrid work in April when it started focusing its engineering hiring in the Chicago hub, and had announced that its remote-first policy would be ending at a company off-site in June. Two staffers present say that Grindr CEO George Arison did not announce a policy change, saying only that the company was keeping its options open with no changes planned in the next six months. In late June, Grindr’s interim head of HR posted a Slack message saying that “nothing is changing yet for our current team” with respect to remote work and that hub-based recruiting would only apply to new hires, according to a screenshot viewed by WIRED.
Grindr’s union estimates that 70 percent of the engineering team, 80 percent of the product department, and 85 percent of the product design team were cut after the first phase of the return-to-office mandate took effect last week. Bauer disputes these figures, but says the company does not release this information publicly.
Members of several other teams at Grindr, including those working on privacy and customer experience, will face expulsions during a second phase of the rollout next year if they do not agree to the in-office policy. The exodus has raised concerns among the remaining staff about the app’s functionality, recalling Elon Musk’s employee purge at Twitter and the ensuing glitchy chaos.
Erick Cortez, a knowledge specialist on Grindr’s customer experience team, who is based in Dallas, Texas, doesn’t yet know where he’ll be asked to move. “We’ve gotten no guidance whatsoever,” he says. Cortez works with engineers to resolve bugs in the Grindr app. Now that most of the engineering team is gone, he says, “we have already run into quite a few issues where we simply don’t know who to reach out to.”
While many tech companies including Amazon, Meta, and Google have been cracking down on remote work, Grindr’s rollout was particularly abrupt. Employees say Arison announced the new policy over Zoom in August, then quickly ended the meeting before a staffer could finish asking a question. Cortez and another employee say questions posted in Slack afterward were ignored.
The new policy blindsided many Grindr workers because of Arison’s previous commitments to remote work, his remarks at the June off-site, and the reassurances HR posted on Slack. Employees hired as recently as a few weeks before the announcement were not told they would be expected to work in the office, according to the two staff members. Last month, the CWA filed an unfair labor practice charge, alleging that the mandate was meant to punish the staff for unionizing.
Cortez says the cuts disproportionately impacted union supporters—nine out of 11 union organizing committee members were forced out. He says the company disabled the chat feature in Zoom during all-hands meetings in the weeks following the announcement, then restored it after the terminated employees were gone. That action is the subject of one of the unfair labor practice charges that Grindr’s union filed today, arguing that the company unlawfully shut down a channel of communication used to discuss workplace matters.
For Robin, a transgender employee who asked WIRED to withhold their gender and real name for fear of retaliation, the mandate forced a choice between a job they loved and a support system that includes trusted doctors who provide their transgender medical care. They ultimately chose to leave the company. Robin says coming to Grindr was “a blast of fresh air” compared to other jobs in the tech industry. “I felt normal. I didn’t feel like the one queer person or the most noticeable queer person at the company. It was what I was always looking for. And now that’s gone.”
None of the roughly eight openly trans employees who would have had to relocate chose to do so, “which shows a disparate impact on a marginalized class of workers,” Robin says. “Demanding that LGBTQ+ people move for their jobs in this political environment conflicts so much with Grindr’s mission, that it’s close to its users, that it’s a part of the community.”
In one of the two charges filed today with the NLRB, the CWA alleges that a severance agreement offered to departing employees that bars the disclosure of company policies and plans would likely be interpreted as restricting their right to communicate with one another, the NLRB, and the union.
The gutting of Grindr isn’t the first time the CWA has alleged RTO policy is being used as a tool for union busting. In January, the union filed charges against Alphabet, claiming its return-to-office policy punished YouTube employees who had recently unionized, a charge Alphabet denies.
Shortly after Arison was hired as CEO in October, Twitter users unearthed tweets he’d written expressing support for conservative politicians, many of whom had expressed anti-LGBTQ+ views. Robin was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt after he told staff he would change, but says the recent alleged union busting has broken that trust.
Despite the conflict with staff and mass departures, Cortez says many workers still at the company hope to salvage the Grindr they came to love, and that the union is hoping to reverse the return-to-office policy. “Grindr is not your typical workplace,” he says. “It has given me and many of my coworkers a space where we can be ourselves without needing to hide who we are. I want to protect what Grindr stands for.”
