AllianceBernstein employees celebrate Pride Month in New York
AllianceBernstein, the Wall Street asset management firm that last year decided to move its headquarters to Nashville, is warning the Tennessee General Assembly against passing some proposed anti-LGBT laws.
From a company statement:
AB chose to move to Tennessee because we believe it is a welcoming state that is focused on growing jobs, incomes and the tax base, which will improve lives for all Tennesseans. We believe strongly in the need for continued investments in education, safety and infrastructure for all. The bills being debated in the current session of legislature send a clear message to certain constituencies that they are not welcome. Other states have tried to pass similar bills, and this has proven to be anti-growth, anti-jobs and against the interests of the citizens of those states.
AllianceBernstein COO Jim Gingrich was scheduled to appear alongside activists from the Tennessee Equality Project, the Nashville LGBT Chamber and other groups at the legislature’s offices Tuesday, but was unable to make it. But Nashville LGBT Chamber CEO Joe Woolley says the firm included his group in deliberations long before they announced they would relocate to Nashville. And, he says, the company has been in touch with him on a weekly basis since
the start of this legislative session in January.
One of the bills that raised alarms for the advocates would have specifically allowed adoption agencies to refuse services “that conflict with the agency’s sincerely held religious beliefs.” That bill, sponsored by Republican Sen. Joey Hensley and Rep. John Ragan, was taken off notice this week, but TEP Executive Director Chris Sanders says the group is "treating them all as serious threats."
The other bills on their watch list:
- SB364/HB563: This would “prohibit state and local governmental entities from taking discriminatory action against a business based on that business's internal policies,” but the TEP named it the “Business License to Discriminate Bill.”
- SB1297/HB1151: According to the bill language, “expands the offense of indecent exposure to include incidents occurring in a restroom, locker room, dressing room, or shower, designated for single-sex, multi-person use, if the offender is a member of the opposite sex than the sex designated for use.” The TEP calls it “a devious attempt to criminalize transgender and gender nonconforming people in restrooms and locker rooms.”
- SB1499/HB1274: This bill would require the state attorney general to defend schools that are sued over policies limiting bathroom access for transgender people.
- SB1282/HB1369: A proposal that would reiterate “the policy of Tennessee to defend natural marriage between one man and one woman regardless of any court decision to the contrary.”
“It is hard to attract employees to states that are not open and welcoming,” Woolley says. “Think of how it looks trying to get people from San Francisco in the tech industry or the Northeast and the financial sector to relocate here when that's what they see the South representing.”
And yet financial sector companies like AllianceBernstein and tech industry companies like Amazon and Oracle have and continue to plot relocations to Nashville.
