In late 2022, LGBTQ+ dating network Grindr appointed George Arison, a MAGA-supportive tech exec, as its new CEO. Already familiar with controversy, the app has since opened a “dehumanising” and “retaliatory” war on its union-hopeful workers – an allegation that it is currently slogging out in America’s courts.
George Arison [centre] rings to New York Stock Exchange Closing Bell
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
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Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
H. (identity anonymised) remembers the day, November 18th, 2022, that Grindr opened on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The company was under fresh-faced management, and a jubilant video was disseminated of its C-suite – gender-diverse, multiracial, and flagrantly queer – performing the press-of-a-button ritual to formalise the app’s stride into financial promised land. This, it seemed, would be its new start following several years of controversy-strewn tumult. And, for a short while, it was.
Less than a year later, though, the façade was falling. By September, an estimated half of the employees who appeared in that video had been chased out the company, victims of what the US National Labour Relations Board (USNLRB) has since characterised as illegal and retaliatory union-busting. The company’s executives are now contesting two counts of labour abuse at an administrative trial, stalling the outcomes in an attritional war on its workers’ rights.
***
The first cracks had appeared much earlier. Grindr, with its 14 million registered users, is the largest LGBTQ+ dating app in the world. Its primary service is a sort of phygital update to queer life’s primordial cruising culture, offering its users connection – usually sexual, sometimes otherwise – at a button’s press. It is essentially omnipresent in the queer conscious, so much so that gallons of academic ink have been spilt debating the manifold ways its online remediation of intimacy has transformed the LGBTQ+ id.
Unsurprising, then, it is no stranger to controversy. Scrapped features that allow users to segregate matches by race, systemic failures to protect minors, the sale of sensitive personal data, including HIV status, to DL third parties – accusations are both exhaustive and polymorphous. Of all these, though, it was the latter that backdropped the company’s current crisis, convulsed particularly by the app’s 2016 purchase by the Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. As alarm bells were tolled on the app’s historically reckless harvesting of personal data and the Red Scare-reminiscent potential for foreign exploitation and blackmail, the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) intervened and ordered Kunlun to de-invest, citing risks to national security.
US-based San Vicente Acquisitions LLC would subsequently purchase Grindr for $608.5 million in 2020 – a sale that was tepidly questioned due to the company’s “financial and personal links” to the previous owners and for its straight executive team – and a new phase of reassimilating Grindr as an American public asset was entered. This included opening the company as a public SPAC through a special merger – a move heralded as irregular and slightly démodé, but otherwise unremarkable.
In September 2022, a second change of leadership within two years was announced. George Arison, a Tbilisi-born political scientist and businessman who had met his husband on the app, was to take the company’s reins and prepare it for full public opening on the stock market. In press releases, he was progressively pedalled as “the first openly gay man to take a company public”; Arison responded without any maudlin words or sentimentality, simply pledging “amazing business services” and “great products.”
A few days after the announcement, the performative posturing fast folded. them magazine published a takedown of the businessman’s political inclinations, which included announcing, “FYI, I am a conservative & agree with some Trump policies” via Twitter in early 2020. Elsewhere, he enthused that Glenn Youngkin, a GOP governor who had decimated trans youth protections and who opposes gay marriage “[s]hould totally run for president.” Arison even saved snug words for Ron DeSantis, the Floridian Svengali behind the state’s “don’t say gay” schooling crackdown. The tag #DeleteGrindr soon went surging on Twitter. Several users vowed to boycott the app outright.
Internally, promises of change were made. The company publicly affirmed Arison to be “passionate about fighting for the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ people around the world,” even if his own statements contradicted this. (In a more recent interview, Arison described Grindr as an apolitical company that would only involve itself if gay marriage came under threat, evidently unbothered about the ongoing dismantling of trans rights across the US and worldwide).
Employees remained sceptical. It was “very upsetting,” H., who identifies as trans, recalls. Having already faced a decade of “harassment” as a trans person in the tech industry, they thought that Grindr represented a small, LGBTQ+-inclusive enclave in its otherwise heteronormative topography. Throughout their recruitment and onboarding, they were made promises of a company culture that uplifts trans people and addresses their needs. A senior team member even gave a lofty speech about using his cis-het privilege to protect trans colleagues. H. now realises these promises were vacuous, their own hopefulness “naïve.” They describe the revelations of Arison’s personal ideology like a kick in the teeth, a plunging “knife in the back.”
Grindr’s NYSE opening the following month was, at face value, an uproarious success. For the occasion, Wall Street’s humdrum, modernist monotony was disrupted by rainbow banners and other queer kitsch, visually declaring that there was space in the financial and tech markets for a queer-owned, queer-oriented app. Grindr stocks opened the day at a respectable $16.90 – by the afternoon, they had surged to $71, proclaiming a lurid investor frenzy in the app’s queer tech-world niche. As the company’s C-suite celebrated on that videoed podium, Arison flanked, a smirk on his elliptical, egg-round face.
There was afterwards a palpable electricity within the company: “I have my own issues with capitalism,” H. states, but affirms the blaze of vitality that the affair unleashed. However, the external world looked ever uncomfortable, the company culture uncertain. By November 2022, the U.S.’s political landscape was already being unmoored by a neo-Lavendar Scare proliferating state legislatures, with laws in states like Utah, North Carolina, and Idaho restricting trans participation in sports and access to gender-affirming care. Trump was already toying a third presidential run and pulling ahead as a favourite. The gay and trans rights wins of a nearby era were undeniably beginning to tumble into volatile retrograde.
At the same time, tech workers’ rights were also under assault in COVID-19’s wake, a pandemic which saw company owners’ gigantesque wealth – alongside their egos – swell to inhuman proportions. Elon Musk declared his hostile annexation of Twitter and enacted a hardline return-to-office (RTO) edict which dovetailed mass company layoffs (the Washington Post revealed that his initial goal had been to terminate 75 per cent of its workforce). Arison’s arrival struck at the intersection of these anxieties – a gay conservative with a Silicon Valley, tech-founder disposition. He even brought with him a suitably pornographic update to Mark Zuckerberg’s epochal move fast and break things mantra, declaring feverishly that he wanted everything at Grindr to be done “hardcore.”
***
For the next year, hushed talks of team unionisation were floated. Grindr, nonplussed, continued its growth. In 2023, it reported an 88.8 per cent stock gain and a 33 per cent revenue surge; meanwhile, staffers were assured that no return to in-office policies, like those being seen at Twitter or Meta, were being discussed. As Joseph Meeker, an attorney for the USNLRB testified, “Grindr told its employees many, many times that the remote work benefits were secure.”
Then, in July, employees finally announced the union – Grindr United-CWA, under the Communications Workers of America (CWA) – having won a one-hundred-person (out of a 173-person team) supermajority. But two weeks afterwards, they were blindsided by a shift in policy: all workers must begin work in a selected Grindr office spattered somewhere across the U.S. or otherwise face termination.
H. recalls that the announcement of the reversal was abrupt and one-way, in contrast to the transparent community culture that had previously been fostered by the company. The RTO was declared by Arison over a Zoom call; when a follow-up meeting was ceded, the chat function was disabled and the conversation closed before any workers could intervene. Although the company affirms it offered to cover relocation expenses and six months of severance pay for those who chose not to move, H. says that the entire experience was impersonal and “dehumanising” – never mind unfeasible for them due to personal circumstances.
They messaged a senior manager on Slack – the same senior manager who had given that sweeping speech about cis-het privilege and protecting trans colleagues – addressing their concerns on relocation, how this was impossible for trans employees whose support networks and access to healthcare were tied to the cities where they lived (a separate interviewee with the New York Times made parallel complaints). H. was simply rebuffed and told to email a generic inbox. Of the eight openly trans employees who had been working at Grindr, none of them would ultimately choose to relocate.
Furthermore, H. and the USNLRB have speculated that the RTO policy was “retaliatory”, strategically targeted against union members. In the days leading up to the RTO announcement, Grindr had hired Littler Mendelson – a notorious anti-union law firm and the leading legal muscle in Starbucks’ highly-publicised anti-unionisation campaign – as its guiding counsel. As layoffs and relocations were rolled out over two waves, H. remembers feeling they felt roughly “calculated” according to which employees would be most affected – of the 11 members on the union’s organising committee, the majority were pushed out. In total, 83 employees from a team of 173 were forced to leave, 48 per cent of the company’s team.
Grindr, which markets itself as a purveyor of queer community, pushed 83 people – mostly queer – out of their jobs in a nominally LGBTQ+-friendly workplace at a time of increasing anti-queer hostility, both in- and out-side the workplace. All they had asked for was safety and security, perhaps some scrutiny of the CEO’s own anti-LGBTQ+ past. What they received was, if the USNRLB is to be believed, an illegal assault on their fundamental workers’ rights.
***
In an interview this June, Arison was asked how he felt – with a couple of years’ remove – about the initial backlash over his RTO layoffs. He said that he was “unrepentant,” and complained that “at Shift [his previous company], no one ever thought about doing less than 60 hours a week. But then I showed up at Grindr… A very large chunk of our employees had been in an environment where working four hours a day was a lot.”
In another interview, he called Elon Musk “the greatest entrepreneur the world has ever produced” and stated, “working 50 or 55 hours a week should be completely reasonable at a tech company.” Although there is no legal limit on how many hours an adult employee can work in the US, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) considers any hours beyond forty “overtime”; recently, startups in Silicon Valley have started compelling staffers to work almost double this – 12 hours a day, six days a week.
Responding to this, H. calls Arison’s accusations baseless and insulting. They maintain that they gave everything they could to Grindr, that employees whose entire lives were vested in the company and its products were axed then chucked curbside like offal. And yet the human cost of expansion has done little to hinder the company’s rampant growth: in 2024, its full-year revenue grew by a third to $345 million and its stock value doubled – despite comparable dating sites like Bumble facing noticeable downturns – and the app became the first to integrate an “AI wingman,” an accomplishment about which it has grinningly boasted. In Grindr’s 2024 fourth quarter shareholders letter, Arison even bragged about the benefits of its return-to-office policy (which, it states, “fostered stronger collaboration… push[ed] boundaries, and [drove] continuous improvement”) and the “vital” work it does for LGBTQ+ people around the world. Arison affirms that his dream is for Grindr to become a “billion-dollar revenue company.”
Meanwhile, the app is still contesting those two counts of labour abuse levelled by the USNLRB – which H. believes its Littler Mendelson lawyers are trying to stall out until Trump has fulfilled a Project 2025 pledge to gut and skin the agency. And meanwhile, there are former Grindr staffers still seeking work, still facing financial precarity following their firings. And meanwhile, as the company was urged by stockholders to recognise freedom of association and collective bargaining as fundamental human rights, its board declines still, judging such a commitment “unnecessary.”
“Our performance-driven, founder-mode culture,” read its opposing statement per a recent notice, “[is] built on merit and high talent density, [and] is focused on unlocking the full potential of Grindr and each employee… We also maintain a culture of openness and transparency throughout the Company… employees are free to ask questions and discuss issues directly with senior management.”
They concluded thus: “[W]e believe we maintain a healthy workplace culture.”
Grindr United has now started a mutual aid fund to help support those members still out of work. Grindr’s profits, meanwhile, continue to surge upwards.
Grindr were contacted for comment but didn’t reply. Grindr United’s GoFundMe can be found here.
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