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.
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