It’s like deja vu all over again.
Texas business leaders Monday condemned a slate of anti-LGBTQ bills winding through the Texas Legislature as harmful to Texans and as a threat to the state’s economy, which is still reeling from the recession that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic.
Tech companies in particular may be discouraged from doing business in Texas if the bills pass, according to Servando Esparza, executive director for the Texas and the southeast region of TechNet, a network of technology CEOs and executives.
“Any barriers to opportunity in Texas will make it harder for tech companies and other employers to convince other people to call this wonderful place home,” Esparza said. “We respectfully ask lawmakers not to do anything that will make it more challenging for talented, highly educated workers that companies need to hire.”
[…]
Texas Competes singled out 26 bills in the Texas Senate and House that they say would infringe on LGBTQ Texans’ rights, including the sports bans and restrictions on access to gender confirmation health care for transgender children.
“Businesses big and small and economies thrive on certainty,” said Jessica Shortall, managing director of Texas Competes. “What we’re faced with again this year is the uncertainty of whether discriminatory policies will rear their heads and cause all of the problems you’ve heard from our business speakers.”
See here for some background; one of the speakers noted the recent threat by the NCAA as part of the case against these nasty bills. You can see a copy of the letter here, and video of the press conference here. If all of this sounds depressingly familiar, it’s because it’s basically a rerun of the 2017 arguments against the bathroom bill. It’s just that this time around, there are multiple bad bills that threaten not just transgender Texans but the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. If you thought this might have gone away following the bad election cycle Republicans had in 2018, you were wrong.
Two things to note here. One is that the larger business community is not just unhappy about these radical anti-equality bills but also about voter suppression and attacks on renewable energy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was uneasiness about permitless carry as well. The reason for all this is basically the same: All these things that are being attacked by the Republican-controlled Legislature are generally quite popular overall, and these companies want to be attractive to an educated, young, and diverse workforce that supports them even more. Throw in the spectacle of not just hurricanes and droughts but also winter storms that leave you without power and water for three days in super cold weather, and maybe our fabled bidness-friendly climate isn’t quite as attractive as it once was. What happens when current and prospective employees decide they don’t want to move to Texas, even if it has lower taxes and cheaper housing?
Which brings me to my second point, which you’ve heard me say many times. Talk is cheap. Action is what matters, and the only action these Republicans are going to understand is losing elections. (Which is one reason why they’re busy trying to rig the rules in their favor.) Businesses and business groups try to be non-partisan or bi-partisan by nature, and that has served them well for many years. But one party is pushing these bills that they hate, and one party is not. There are very few Republicans these days who don’t support these kinds of bills, and most of them are not in positions of power. At some point, either you actively work to vote people like that out of office, or you keep facing this same situation. The choice is clear.
If big corporations are for it, then it must be bad for the public.