Grindr employees launch union drive, fueled by tech layoffs and anti-LGBTQ threats

Grindr employees are launching a unionization campaign, extending a wave of organizing among tech workers.

“As members and allies of communities that are systematically oppressed, we know that strength lies in working together, not alone,” employees behind the effort to unionize the LGBTQ dating app wrote in a mission statement. “We’re already all in this together: We just want to DTR,” they added, taking a page from dating shorthand for “define the relationship.”

Pro-union staff say they’ve signed up the vast majority of a proposed bargaining unit of around 100 employees, including those in cloud engineering, IT, design, marketing and quality assurance. They said the recent wave of political attacks on LGBTQ people and the layoffs in the tech industry brought urgency to their campaign, which they are announcing to the company’s management Thursday.

By unionizing, employees say they want to secure existing benefits such as trans-inclusive healthcare and win new protections such as pay transparency and job security.

“We want a company built for queer people, not one built to extract wealth from queer people,” employees said in their letter. “And we want to build it together, united.”

Like Starbucks Corp.’s union, they are urging their company to add a worker representative to the board, a practice that’s common in Europe but rare in the U.S.

The company, which was sold by Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. of China in 2020 after U.S. regulators raised national security concerns, went public last year via a merger with the special purpose acquisition company Tiga Acquisition Corp. The Grindr app, which shows customers a grid of other nearby users organized by how many feet away they are, had 12.8 million monthly active users as of March 31.

Employees are asking Grindr management to recognize their union and say they will petition the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election in case the company refuses. U.S. labor law allows companies to recognize and negotiate with a union as soon as it has signed up a majority of employees, or to refuse and hold out for a government-run election. That labor board election process can mean weeks of wrangling over topics such as which workers should be eligible to vote — time companies often use to campaign against unionization.

“We’re zero feet away,” the workers wrote.

The employees are organizing with the Communications Workers of America, which over the last two years has won union recognition among New York Times tech workers, Microsoft Corp. video game testers, Apple retail staff and subcontracted Google Fiber sales workers. Unions have also recently secured new footholds at prominent, previously union-free companies such as Starbucks and Amazon.com.

“Workers across industries are realizing that they should have a say in the conditions of their workplace,” said Quinn McGee, a Grindr product manager and member of the organizing committee. “This idea is having a resurgence, that workers can come together to make sure we can protect each other from the vicissitudes of the current state of things.”

Bloomberg writer Natalie Lung contributed to this report.