America First Legal, which has been led by incoming Trump administration deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, is claiming victory against American Airlines. The organization says American has agreed to “end illegal DEI practices.”

That is not, however, what the material that American First Legal presents says.

• There’s no admission or even suggestion that American was engaging in illegal discrimination in pursuit of diversity hiring goals.
  
• And there’s no suggestion that American Airlines will change any practices at all.
  
• Instead, the Department of Labor simply asserts that American Airlines is aware of its obligations under the law as a federal contractor, and will follow the law (natch).

/1 ✈️ BREAKING: American Airlines to end illegal DEI employment practices

The U.S. Department of Labor has confirmed that American Airlines will end race and sex-based discrimination in hiring and promotions following AFL’s federal civil rights complaint. pic.twitter.com/xSJBldct8n

— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) December 17, 2024

America First Legal says they’ve come to similar understandings with United and Southwest, also, and that all three carriers will ‘end illegal discrimination’ against White People. Except in none of these cases do any of the airlines or the Department of Labor say that anything illegal was happening, or that any specific practices will change. Instead, they all simply say that the airlines all indicate they will follow the law (and, I am confident, they all assert that they have been doing so to date as well).

/7 Together, United, Southwest, and American control approximately 50 percent of the airline market, and their commitment to ending illegal race and sex-based discrimination across employment practices is a significant step toward restoring fairness in the industry.

— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) December 17, 2024

There is nothing illegal, or inappropriate, about:

• Seeking to identify talent in non-traditional places. That’s just a good Moneyball strategy. The market is pretty efficient for traditional pilot and MBA pipelines, paying candidates at the value of their marginal product for the most part. Companies win when they identify overlooked talent. And that’s especially important when talent is scarce.

• Using benchmarks as a tool to raise questions about the fairness of your process, or whether it is a helpful process to attract the best possible talent. You want to know if you’re unfriendly or unwelcoming, or if minor adjustments could make you an attractive place for talent you’re missing. Note, often unsaid in all of this, and a bit uncomfortable for DEI advocates is that this approach helps companies hire talent for less money.

To be sure, there may be informal enforcement of quotas at some airlines, in some departments, and for some roles. I am aware of an executive promoted to the vice president level at an airline where their primary qualification was viewed as their race (and in fact, the airline believed this benefited their business interest). However, nothing presented in the record in these complaints obviously demonstrate illegal quotas.

Many non-profits do good work, but many are also grifts. Sometimes it can be tough to sort out which is which. There’s a strong incentive to overstate successes, in order to appear even more effective than they are, to make the strongest case possible for funding. Donors know that organizations do this, and so they account for it in their own thinking.

• A group that might rate 7 out of 10 on effectiveness presents itself as 10 out of 10
  
• Knowing this, donors discount all presentations by 3
  
• So a group that was earnest, and presented as a 7 would get penalized – they’d be assumed to be blowing smoke and really a 4.

In a sense, non-profit exaggeration – as appears to be happening in this case – becomes like resort fees. Everyone knows they’re wrong, but a hotel trying to do the right thing with honest and transparent pricing would look more expensive than the bad actor as a result of dropping resort fees. So they keep the fees in place, in order to avoid putting themselves at a disadvantage.

My unpopular but related take on Al Qaeda was that there weren’t actually a large number of people willing to die to harm the United States. All cause-oriented groups, they eventually need to show some amount of success to please their donors and keep funds flowing. Most members just liked being attached to the cause, and most of the 9/11 hijackers didn’t actually know they were on a suicide mission. That’s a big part of why we didn’t see other, similar attempts afterward.

Ultimately discrimination law was intended to protect traditionally marginalized groups from harm. But those same laws forbid outright discrimination against anyone that’s a government contractor. So over the summer America First Legal sued Expedia for refusing to hire a white male executive.

In the travel space, this effort isn’t just about airlines. And these legal efforts aside, there does seem to broadly be a big cultural shift compared to the latter years of the previous decade. Traditionally, discrimination rules have been enforced only when the actions harm members of a protected class. There’s an effort here to apply them more broadly.

An interesting takeaway, though, is that corporations used to be bogeymen of the left and in recent years have actually been at the vanguard of social change. There’s been a real crackup in traditional alliances, which makes so many predictions about how politicians will act and coalitions form difficult for many to predict going forward.