Trump-aligned American First Legal is suing Expedia for refusing to hire white male executives.
/1LAWSUIT
Expedia operates one of the world’s largest online travel sites and appears to be engaged in blatant discrimination against white male job applicants.
We just partnered with Cooper & Kirk and joined in a lawsuit against Expedia for violations of civil rights law: pic.twitter.com/AYr9ZZ33yc
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) June 17, 2024
Michael Kascsak, a former talent acquisition executive with Google, Capital One, Bank of America, and PayPal, was offered a job at Expedia and says he was told that the offer was pulled so that they could hire a black female instead.
The Senior Vice President of Talent Acquisition conveyed to the plaintiff that Expedia’s bizarre handling of his candidacy was due to Expedia’s Chief People, Inclusion, and Diversity Officer, Michael David Velasco’s desire to hire a “diverse candidate” for the role.
Ultimately, Expedia decided to hire a “diverse” last-minute internal referral candidate. Notably, the plaintiff in this case is a white male.
When I read more than just America First Legal tweets on the issue, things get more complicated.
- Expedia made an offer.
- He did not accept it, instead trying to negotiate for a higher salary.
- That triggered discussion at Expedia around the role, in the context of ongoing downsizing at the company. Expedia communicated to him that they might want to go with someone more junior.
- And indeed instead of adding to head count they gave the position to someone already on staff.
There are allegations that Expedia’s real motive in going with the internal and more diverse hire was diversity. In March, Expedia won dropping its Chief People, Inclusion, and Diversity Officer, Michael Velasco from the suit for lack of personal jurisdiction in Texas, but failed to dismiss the suit entirely for failure to state a claim (whether claiming intersectional discrimination based on being white, male, and 49 meant he wasn’t claiming racial discrimination as the but-for cause of the adverse employment decision).
It seems odd that if the issue was “but-for” racial discrimination that the job candidate would have gotten an offer in the first place after several rounds of interviews. Only then Expedia decided that they didn’t like hiring white men?
There are many, many things to complain about with Expedia. I’ve found their customer service to be exceptionally poor over the course of many years. I haven’t found their booking systems to have really improved since they were part of Microsoft in the 1990s. Other than doing deals to sell search result placement, it’s never been super clear what their staff of thousands actually does. But one guy who turned down a salary, doesn’t seem to support the claim that the company is “engaged in blatant discrimination against white male job applicants”?
He was offered a job and balked at it and the company did a rethink. It happens more often than most think. And it’s not discrimination.
That law firm America First is headed by Ultra MAGA Stephen Miller
Stephen Miller is credited with shaping the racist and draconian immigration policies of President Trump, which include the zero-tolerance policy, also known as family separation, the Muslim ban and ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Miller also “purged” government agencies of civil servants who are not entirely loyal to his extremist agenda, according to a report in Vanity Fair.
Is a Western District of Texas jury that much different than a Southern District of New York jury?
I can’t say that I ever found Expedia useful. I remember Expedia being one of the initial big players in internet travel sales, with glitzy TV ads. Maybe Expedia still is big, I don’t know.
A western district of Texas federal court is quite different than a SDNY federal court. Which is why some litigants venue shop for a court they consider to be more friendly
It’s the plaintiff’s own fault. Sometimes when you negotiate, you lose. I think this is just a political stunt.
I hope the case is thrown out because it’s frivolous.
Companies are reading the tea leaves and dropping DEI programs right and left. SCOTUS gutted it for colleges (thankfully) and now any companies are facing the same thing. People may think it is extreme but you can’t favor minority candidates over White ones or have loan programs solely for minority small businesses. Courts across the country are ruling this is discrimination and it will likely end up with a SCOTUS ruling that eliminates all racial basis in hiring or promotion. Just because you have a goal of a more diverse workforce doesn’t mean you can protect certain jobs or turn down more qualified White candidates. Racial discrimination works both ways and the pendulum swung way too far to the left.
Entering grad school I worked full time and applied for a scholarship because I was advised by my councilor that the intensive MBA program was not conducive to working full time. The dean of the business school (a decision authority) then informed me that I was the “wrong sex and color to apply.” The scholarship was given to the only black woman in the program and after receiving the scholarship, she dropped out of the program the first quarter. Don’t ever try to tell me that discrimination does not exist or that executives do not explicitly discriminate. I do not know the particulars of this case or why Al went off on his rant, but I would keep an open mind.
Straight white males, the only safe group to discriminate against. Watch TV for an hour or two, and track the commercials. If a straight white male is shown with another demographic person, 100% of the time he will be displayed as stupid, weak, foolish, a lower level employee, etc. This actually holds all the way down the woke victimhood ranking. A lesbian black woman will always be shown as superior to for example an Asian woman. And of course if you went by tv commercials alone, you’d think 40% of the population is gay or trans, 60% black, and about 20% white. The discrimination is obvious. But somehow when it goes that way it’s ok?
Good.
The democrats have the courts into a laughing stock. No harm in beating them at their own game.
Bounce MORE BS lawsuits around!
Will you be providing political leanings about every company you discuss in the future?
Just curious as everywhere we go everything has become a binary political discussion.
Most of us hate both parties as they are incompetent and basically screwing over the average person.
What you guys are forgetting that quality education in the USA is not equal at the K thru 12 level.
Minority areas are not as well funded as white areas.
This is not OK
The way schools are funded is not equal and there is no big push to fix this. Especially by Republicans.
This is the root issue that diversity tries to help fix.
This AC person above is oblivious to the root problem.
Miller, aka a worm in human form, isn’t doing this to win a case, it’s a loser. He’s doing to show that white people are being persecuted, like the whiny guy he fronts. It’s a symbol for the racists amongst us, they shall overcome
As long as it’s not tossed, Expedia will settle out of court. Reason? Discovery. If the case is allowed to procede, the plantiff will be allowed to ask for internal company documents, including those for similar hires. The last thing Expedia wants is a lawyer looking through their internal documents and hiring choices post-2020. They aren’t the only company/organization to engage in blatantly discriminatory (and illegal) behavior post-George Floyd. There are universities where 80% of the hires are known to be minorities. And lots of anecdotal cases where people were told to their face that they had to hire the POC. Anecdotal, yes, but where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire. Some of these are going to head to court.
You may not like the plantiff’s lawyer, but this is clean-up time for the plantiffs bar. Watch how many of those previously opposed to civil lawsuit reform suddenly come out in favor of it.
Almost all of Coporate America reeks of the stench DE and the impact of its blatant discrimination against whites and best qualified. Way past time it is dismantled company by company and if suing them one by one get its done fine!
Companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They don’t want to be in the business of making sure their companies are diverse, but if they aren’t, they can be subject to discrimination lawsuits. And now, if they are diverse, it means they get sued for being too diverse. I’m retired now, but I remember what things were like when I was hired in 1980. I worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories. The practices of the time were to set up factories and engineering locations in the suburbs, to avoid diverse urban populations. They only hired from certain universities for their engineering staff, and that did not include historically black universities. Women with engineering degrees were hired at a position lower than men with engineering degrees. AT&T had recently lost a couple of discrimination lawsuits for these and other practices, and changes started to happen. Quotas have always been illegal, but hiring practices started to change. We started recruiting from historically black universities, and supported them by sending our employees to work as a visiting professor there.
A well defined affirmative action plan does not depend on quotas or preferences, but on making the company better known as a possible employer among diverse populations. The existing population of employees also has to be welcoming to the new employees, which means they, at the very least, have to stop referring to new employees using the N-word, and stop telling jokes poking fun at ethnic, sexual, or other characteristics. One of the women I met early on the job quit because she was being treated poorly just for being a woman, by a small subset of people. The affirmative action programs (frequently court mandated) were the beginning of what is now considered woke culture, but it’s really just being respectful to people. In one of the many diversity meetings we had, one of the best things I learned, was that they golden rule would be better written as, “Do unto others the way they want to be treated”. Not how you would want to be treated, but how they want to be treated, which is not always the same.
In all the disparagement thrown against woke culture, we need to be sure we don’t end up back in the same patterns of the 1970s. That’s not to say all white people always had a great position, just that the best positions have all to frequently been filled by white men, and I doubt white men have a monopoly on being smart, effective, or great leaders.
Stephen Miller a whiner wannabe Herr Himmler, Chumps choice to be Attorney General. This dude actually wants to set up a Uber Reich in this country that will make Chump proud.
White boys now getting a taste of what discrimination is like. Biden should set up a annual day for Chump whiners. If Chump loses then we’ll see a repeat of 2020 whiners, at least those that are not in prison. Whaaa, Whaaa, Biden cheated.
And once again, a problem caused by the government. In a free society, this would never be a problem and companies would be able to hire or fire anyone they want and for any reason.
People freaking out about diversity hiring initiatives in the US are so ridiculous. Businesses and other institutions have their own selfish reasons to have the hiring and retention practices they do and aren’t hiring people as part of a Communist mentality. They hire and retain people primarily to appeal to their own position, their own institutional needs and to signal to the market. There is no bigger affirmative action program in America than that for the children of the wealthy, of alumni of privileged institutions and of those with bigger and more privileged social networks.
….. and in the US, the people who disproportionately benefit from that are European-American.
Internal hires and minority hires tend to be employees who cost their employers less money in employment compensation costs than external hires from more privileged demographic backgrounds in the country. And a bias in favor of internal hires also helps with retention of other employees and keeping salaries/wages and hiring costs down.
To bad Gary is spotlighting racist GOP ARTICLES
There definitely is a fair amount of discrimination against white males. I see no reason to think this is an example of it, though. This is a political stunt.
@GUtlessWonder – If any equally qualified group were cheaper to hire, companies would do that instantly. Minorities aren’t cheaper to hire, and if they were paid less the companies would be sued for systematic discrimination, so you’re talking BS. Do you even think before pecking out your useless talking points? Companies have no interest whatsoever in hiring people for one cent more than they have to, so they’re not going to pay “more privileged demographic backgrounds” more just because they’re rich white dudes (fixed it for you). They might hire a lesser qualified person because Daddy will send a lot of business their way and the salary could be considered the cost of doing business, but that applies to everyone with that profile, not just who you’re implying. Hollywood is full of nepotism for ugly/untalented children, but that ranges from the Spellings to the Obamas. Happens on Wall Street and publishing, too. Wish it didn’t, because I’ve never had those connections and my kids are more talented than those who do get the job.
“I fail to see what Loren calls “a fair amount of discrimination” as discrimination is inherently UNfair. We need to go back to the principles of the Pendleton Civil Service Act which provided that federal government jobs be awarded on the basis of merit and that government employees be selected through competitive exams.
DEI: Didn’t Earn It.
Visible ethnic minorities, immigrants, females and internal hires tend to be cheaper to hire as employees and cheaper to retain as employees for a given position than to hire from outside those individuals who come from more privileged backgrounds. And those historically underprivileged groups also tend to be less likely to have the resources and time to successfully engage in litigation against the financially better-off and better-lawyered employers in a federal court system where judges are more consistently corporate apologists than anything else.
Employees coming in or up via DEI initiatives tend to have more than earned it as they tend to have started off from less advantaged backgrounds than someone like me.
That CM is whining on behalf of his kids instead of telling his kids to step up their game is understandable. But it is also lame while whining about the advances of people from even less advantaged backgrounds.
Initiate ALL CAPS!
THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS!!!!!!!
Before, companies would just hire the smart and educated white males to be employed and solve a lot of problems and make the company a lot of money. Now they hire the less qualified diverse candidate as an employee to sit around while they pay a white male consultant to do the real job. Costs the company a little more but damn it makes them feel good about themselves for being “diverse”. Lol
Obviously there can only be one reason for this injustice . . . it’s Trump’s fault. Politics 24/7 makes for cheap content.
The inappropriately named “America First Legal” group is a driver in this litigation and hoping for more litigation like it. It is a Trump-aligned organization and peddling the narrative that “white males” are victims of systemic injustice in America and are more likely to be victims of systemic injustice than the “protected class” demographic groups in the country. What is interesting is how Trump seems in line to get up to around 38% of U50 African-American male support in November and up to around 21% of African-American support overall in November while playing up the “racism against heterosexual white males” victim card.
I could spend the next 30 minutes refuting @GUtlessWonder’s insane arguments, or I could spend the next 30 minutes repeatedly dropping a can of peaches on my toe. I went with the peaches, as it was more likely the can of peaches would learn something.
For those that complain about DEI hiring less competent people, i trump you with all those white Boeing CEOs and executive teams for the last twenty years.
Attempting to refute is distinct from objectively refuting.
C_M is welcome to engage in self-abuse with that can of peaches, as free adults in a supposedly free country should be able to freely do to their own bodies what they want to do — including not being forced to give birth to rapists’ kids.
@ted poco:
> For those that complain about DEI hiring less competent people, i trump you with all those white Boeing CEOs and executive teams for the last twenty years.
The problem with this is that past discrimination doesn’t justify current discrimination. Unless you have a time machine it’s impossible to fix previous discrimination. All that actually happens is that **more** discrimination is created in the name of fighting discrimination. We should be aiming for a non-discriminatory future but we should not be trying to “correct” past discrimination. Admit/hire the most qualified regardless of group. To the extent feasible make this process blind to race and gender. (The more people involved the easier this would be–there’s no reason the people doing university admissions need to know any of the physical properties of the prospects they are deciding on. They should only see anonymized data.)
Past discrimination produces currents results of discrimination. Just look at the highest ranked private US colleges/universities. They discriminate in favor of the wealthy, alumni, and the well-connected and the “DEI”/“affirmative action” tends to be just marginal windowdressing compared to the affirmative action for the wealthy, alumni, employees and other well-connected persons.
Never do business with Expedia!
During my 2021 trip to Cancun, booked cab ride from hotel to airport. Cab never showed up. After trip, called Expedia multiple times for refund. Each rep was only interested in (and trained to) sell me products and ended calls with “someone will call you back.”
@GUtlessWonder – Rather than try to advocate for DEI discrimination, you could just advocate for abolishing all of it – but somehow I see you benefiting from it, and you like DEI to assuage the guilt.
Do this – publish a standard. Either you meet the standard or you don’t. Put all the names in a hat, pull them one at a time, the name pulled gets to declare a major, you could even require a certain score to declare certain majors – e.g. a certain minimum math score for math intensive majors. Do this publicly. If no majors are left that a name wants, they can pass. Keep going until all the slots are filled. No admissions staff to pay, or a vastly reduced one.
Why they’ll never do it – no selling admission slots or handing out favors to the powerful.
I love how all the leftist DEI supporters immediately claim Kascsak HAS to be the liar! Did you bother to look up who they hired in his place?
According to LinkedIn and Daily Mail her name is Bernita Dillard and she is a black female from San Francisco area, who’s previous jobs were “Door Dash” Facebook and Google. Not quite the talent they were initially looking for.
But,, NO,, this couldn’t possibly be another case of DEI hiring of someone with half the talent, experience and ability, who the Biden administration wants to push on American business!
I find it telling that many of the posters against DEI initiatives assert that a person of color is always significantly less “qualified” than a white male applying for the same position. That is not how DEI or human resources work. People often mistake “qualified” and “experience” as synonymous terms. “Qualifications” are the minimum to do the job, while experiences is the how long you’ve been doing those qualified tasks.(but not necessarily how well though). There have been times when a more experienced white male has lost a position to a lesser experienced white male. Perhaps the hired person proved they can do the job significantly better than the more experienced person. It seems to only be a problem though, when it’s a person of color.