In the latest blow to the DEI agenda, Southwest Airlines has reportedly agreed to ground and cancel its DEI employment practices following a federal civil rights complaint by America First Legal (AFL).
Back in January, AFL filed a complaint against Southwest with the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), requesting that the office immediately look into the airline's alleged breach of its contractual obligations under federal contracting law by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring initiatives despite its equal opportunity agreements and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal government contracts since 2007.
Following what AFL called an "informal compliance conference" between Southwest and OFCCP on December 2, AFL announced that Southwest "acknowledged and agreed to end its illegal race and sex-based discrimination in all hiring and promotional processes, including all unlawful DEI quotas, benchmarks, or preferences."
America First Legal Counsel Will Scolinos had this to say:
On your next flight, would you rather be told that your pilot checks the right DEI boxes or that he was hired because he was the best of all competing candidates? Americans have had enough of corporations' overt discrimination under the guise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is unacceptable that corporations are so openly using everyday Americans' hard-earned tax dollars to meet their unlawful race and sex quotas to achieve some ‘correct' amount of diversity and representation. Discrimination on the basis of immutable characteristics is always wrong. AFL will continue to fight against discrimination as a substitute for merit in employment decisions — it's not going to fly.
With corporations abandoning DEI across the board, it's clear that the days of communism masquerading as "diversity, equity and inclusion" are numbered.
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