- Employees at LGBTQ+ dating site Grindr are being asked to return to work in person.
- The company gave employees two weeks to decide if they could move by October.
- The company’s employees say Grindr could be retaliating against them for trying to form a union.
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Management at the popular LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr is asking workers to return to the office or lose their jobs, prompting outrage from employees who say the move will upend their lives.
According to a form sent to workers at Grindr on August 4, obtained by Vice’s Motherboard, workers would need to confirm by August 17 whether or not they would move within 50 miles of Grindr’s three offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, or the San Francisco Bay Area or lose their jobs at the end of the month.
The news comes two weeks after employees announced their effort to unionize under the Communications Workers of America, Grindr United. Grindr United posted Sunday that the pivot to in-person work by the company is a “bizarre coincidence.”
The CWA has also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board as a result of the return to office order, arguing that it is retaliation against union organizing.
Timeline review!
July 20: we tell management that we have organized ourselves and request voluntary recognition.
July 20 – Aug 3: no contact from management. At all. None. Zero.
Aug 4: management announces we have two weeks to decide whether to uproot our lives or we’re fired.
— Grindr United ✊ (@GrindrUnited) August 5, 2023
Rowan Rosenthal, an organizing committee member at Grindr United CWA, told Insider that the move has been a significant hit for Grindr’s “majority queer” workplace, as well as for disabled members of the company.
“A big part of our vision as a union was to enshrine this benefit that we had in the past of remote first to accommodate those folks,” Rosenthal told Insider. “A lot of people who are disabled or have neuro
