A really good in depth article on the subject from the tech press, which is a source I hadn’t thought about for this before.
When Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in February directed state agencies to investigate anyone who provides gender-affirming treatment to transgender children for alleged “child abuse,” he drew a swift and vocal backlash from civil rights groups, medical organizations and the White House.
Tech companies also spoke up, signing pledges or reiterating offers to help employees affected by the order. South by Southwest, the world-renowned tech, music and film festival slated to start in Austin on Friday, condemned Abbott’s order. “The governor’s latest directive puts trans children in harm’s way once again and we unequivocally condemn this action,” SXSW told local newspaper The Austin American-Statesman.
But that’s done nothing to budge Abbott or his supporters from accelerating the shift further to the right in Texas politics.
Indeed, the governor’s directive about trans youth was just the latest in a series of laws and orders targeting social issues, including voting, reproductive and gun rights. But for a state that has seen such an influx of new voices — Texas has the ninth-largest economy in the world, is the third-fastest growing state and has added more people than any other state in the past decade — the overall public response to this slew of laws and orders affecting individual rights has not been as resounding as political observers expected. That’s especially the case when it comes to the booming tech community, which has played a key role in the state’s expansion in recent years.
That dynamic underscores the tradeoff that tech companies — and the liberal employees who have moved to Texas — must reconcile as their values collide with their wallets.
Tech and Texas have become intrinsically linked. It’s no coincidence that the so-called Texas Miracle, which refers to a decade-long period of economic expansion after the Great Recession, has continued as technology companies relocate or expand in the Lone Star State. The companies include the likes of Tesla, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Apple, Google and Amazon.
“Businesses are having a really difficult time deciding how to position themselves on these issues of social justice and public policy,” Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said over Zoom.
The reason? Taking a stand on social issues is hard when you are benefiting from a fiscal and regulatory agenda that makes Texas a business haven, according to several experts. Compared with other states, especially California, doing business in Texas is much less expensive. Texas has no state income tax or capital-gains tax on individuals and has fewer business regulations. By moving to Texas, tech companies are “escaping high taxes and a regulatory environment,” Bill Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Houston’s Rice University, said over Zoom.
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Indeed, the hard turn right in Texas politics hasn’t taken a toll on the state’s economic growth prospects or even on recruitment efforts of tech companies located in the state, especially those in the ever-expanding and liberal-leaning metropolitan areas of Austin, Dallas and Houston.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the radicalization of Texas social policies won’t have an impact on the state’s economic or social future. Political experts, academics and business leaders interviewed by CNET expressed concern that the trend — assuming it continues — will eventually tarnish the Texas brand and make it increasingly difficult for companies to attract and retain top talent.
But also at stake is the role that corporate America can play in society at a time when consumers and employees expect business leaders to advocate for social responsibility.
“Texas will become a textbook example of what happens when social policy and marginalized, underserved, underrepresented communities become the collateral damage of corporate political giving,” Jen Stark, senior director of corporate strategy at Tara Health Foundation, a nonprofit focused on engaging private companies to advance gender and racial equity, said over Zoom. “Companies have been complicit in setting up an extremist government in Texas and other states.”
I found this article in a completely serendipitous fashion. The Sunday print edition of the Chron carried an excerpt from the New York Times story about how the 2030 Census might be done, and when I did a Google search for it I also got this story among the results. You never know.
The story goes into demography, the fact that some actions companies had taken in the past had little effect even among their own employees, data about people not wanting to move here because of our wingnut politics is more anecdotal than anything else, and because living in mostly Democratic urban areas provides some illusion of comfort. The somewhat ironic good news is that if these current trends continue, which have among other things contributed greatly to the fast growth in Democratic and Dem-trending urban and suburban areas, we really will turn the state blue in a few more years. Of course, a lot of damage can be done in the meantime, and as we well know by now, waiting for demography to do your work for you is at best a deeply frustrating experience. My takeaway from all this is that nothing will beat good old fashioned organizing, the kind we’ve been getting better at lately. Lord knows, there’s no time to spare. Read the rest and see what you think.