Yelp to pay for employees traveling for abortion access

Yelp Chief Diversity Officer Miriam Warren sits down with Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the company's covering travel expenses for employees seeking an abortion, states with legislation restricting reproductive rights, and the backlash companies may face.

Video Transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance, everyone. Yelp became the latest company to announce it's paying for employees and their spouses who need to travel out of state to get abortion care. For more on this, I'm joined by Miriam Warren, Yelp's chief diversity officer. Thank you for joining me so much today. So why did Yelp decide to make this move? And talk about some of the conversations that led up to it.

MIRIAM WARREN: Absolutely. In the wake of Texas' SB8 law passing, we started to recognize that as a company with more than 4,000 employees distributed across all 50 states, that this would be an issue that we would need to start looking into. And the conversations inside of Yelp were pretty clear from the beginning, which is to say that our insurance providers have always allowed for reproductive health care to be covered.

And in order for us to be able to extend that coverage to every employer, regardless of what state they live in, as well as their dependents, it would become clear that we needed to be able to provide this travel reimbursement as well, so that if someone needed to elect to move to another state or travel to another state in order to get the kind of care that they needed, we would want to be able to provide them that. And that's really what led to this decision.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And perhaps for other companies who are looking at this and wondering what the blueprint might look like, are there sort of any limitations or exceptions that come with this sort of coverage?

MIRIAM WARREN: I think as different companies are considering this, it's very important to consider where employees are based. So for us, as a distributed workforce, where most all of our employees are working remotely, it is really key to consider the geographic location of all of these employees. I think it's also important to really connect with the insurance providers that will be a key stakeholder in this process.

Obviously, employers do not want to deal with the confidentiality issues or to have employees feel like they need to tell anyone else inside of the company. And so because this type of benefit is really processed through an insurance provider, it's very important to get into lockstep with them.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: It's interesting because it's framed as this natural broadening out of health care expenses. How are employees responding to this?

MIRIAM WARREN: We've received a really positive response from both employees and also consumers. And I think what they're telling us is, hey, this is an issue that matters to us as employees. It matters to us that the company is also caring about it, and it matters to us that you're speaking out about it.

So no longer are employees in a position where they think that just a paycheck is enough from their employers. They are really challenging the employee-employer social contract. And I think what a lot of that means is that they are asking for their employers to not only provide benefits that consider the entirety of their lives, but also asking for employers to speak out on social issues that impact their lives.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And obviously, when you do take a stand, especially on an issue like abortion, you're going to have backlash. In fact, we did see that after Citigroup said it would cover travel expenses for abortion access, that Texas legislator Briscoe Cain threatened to introduce legislation to bar local governments from doing business with companies that has such policies. Has Yelp received similar backlash or responses from some of the states who do not want this sort of access?

MIRIAM WARREN: Up till now, we haven't. One of the things that I think is important to note here is that often, the backlash gets much more press coverage. But what often doesn't get much coverage is the fact that so many consumers and employees and others that see these types of moves in the press really thank us for them.

In fact, I've already seen a number of these thank you's come through various aliases at the company, as well as on social media today, which really gives me a heartened feeling in the sense that this isn't an easy thing to stand up for, for a lot of companies. And for us, it really is an obvious choice on so many levels, not least of which is the issue of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. And when you start to think about those issues, as companies that care about them, we absolutely had to take a stand in this instance and in many others.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And as you mentioned, this is the latest example of companies increasingly weighing in on some of these political issues. We had Disney obviously with the Don't Say Gay Bill. So are we now in a time where companies cannot afford to sit on the sidelines or perhaps not take a stand?

MIRIAM WARREN: I really don't think they can. And I think that really comes back to that change that you're seeing in the employee-employer social contract. And I think the reason for that is particularly for knowledge workers in the last 2 and 1/2 years, where their work has come home with them and has lived in their home with them, and has been there all of these days that all of us have experienced, it really is a situation in which we can no longer have that separation between our work and our lives because our work is in our lives, literally in our homes.

And so it becomes all the more important that people are aligned and employees especially are aligned with the companies that they worked for in terms of their values. And I think consumers are increasingly telling us that as well, that they want to be able to vote with their dollars. They want to spend money with companies that align with their values. And I think that we're seeing that so much on the Yelp platform, in addition to seeing that as corporate stewards and leaders inside the company as well.