Public Sq., RedBalloon Step in to Help Laid Off Bud Light Workers Find Jobs

The 350 casualties of Bud Light’s July layoffs may not have to look far for new employment. After the beer company was forced to slash its workforce over the ongoing boycott, conservative marketplace Public Sq. is stepping in to help the hundreds who lost their jobs by connecting them with “non-woke businesses.”

Company CEO and founder Michael Seifert announced the idea in an open letter. Acknowledging the hardship that comes with losing a job, Seifert said, “We started our business to help people like you. The growing progressive politicization of our economy hurts Americans in so many different ways, and it’s time we take a stand against it.”

RedBalloon, working in tandem with PublicSq., tweeted the same open letter, insisting, “No one should lose their job because of woke ideologies or agendas, and so we want to help.” RedBalloon Communications Director Isaac Lopez told The Washington Stand, “We have had several submit their resumés, and we are actively working with our partner Public Sq. to place them. We want to help workers find jobs with companies that value hard-working Americans.”

A former Bud Light employee was elated by the post. “I got laid off by them. Going to sign up.” Lopez noted how the positive responses were encouraging and said that tens of thousands had already applied. He added that those who use RedBalloon “are looking for freedom in the workplace … And that’s what we hope to offer to these laid-off Bud Light employees.”

On “Washington Watch” Friday, Seifert explained that companies are learning the hard way that political extremism doesn’t pay. “Unfortunately, they are facing the harsh and very real consequences of taking a bad bet on ESG and DEI wokeism. And we throw around this phrase, ‘Go woke, go broke,’ [but] it is real. There are actual consequences to your bottom line, to your employees, to your distributors, to lots of people caught in the middle when your company decides to act more like a progressive political association and organization rather than a business that is focused on simply providing quality to your customers and shareholders. … [And] Bud Light now has dropped over $20 billion in their value.”

After the news broke that 350 people were now jobless as a result of Anheuser-Busch’s transgender outreach, Seifert said, “[w]e felt really inspired to try to help those that had been stuck in all of this crossfire. … [T]hey were, unfortunately, the ones that were facing the brunt of that poor marketing decision. And now they’re out of work. We wanted to help them.” Together with RedBalloon, which Seifert called “a non-woke jobs marketplace,” they put out a call for resumés.

The idea was to distribute those resumés to their combined network of “well over 55,000 small businesses that love the country, the Constitution, and the values that it protects.” Pretty soon, Seifert told guest host Jody Hice, “We got a bunch of resumés [Thursday], because that open letter now has — already in 24 hours — been viewed over 2.5 million times on Twitter.”

He talked to one former Bud Light employee personally, and when he asked about her experience, “She said, ‘I just feel heartbroken that the brand that I’ve dedicated years of my life to would decide to forgo their responsibility of providing a quality product and would instead embrace these policies that hurt us the most.’ And we’re excited to get to work to get her a job.”

Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm applauded Seifert for turning a negative into a “non-woke” positive. “But the fact that a ‘non-woke’ marketplace needs to exist is a comment on the current moment we’re living in. There’s a ton of pressure on corporations to use their influence to promote harmful ideas. In this case, that has cost hundreds of people their jobs as companies discover that there is a limit to how much social justice preaching the marketplace will tolerate.”

AUTHORS

Sarah Holliday 

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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