The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.

The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.

With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case.

The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.

Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?

DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce. There's nothing that implies exclusion unless you are intentionally bad faithing the meaning.

Imagine the FAA was only attending job fairs in white parts of the country. Then they decide to attend job fairs in more diverse parts of the country. No one would suddenly decide they were prejudiced against white people!

There's a difference between forcing a white person to give up a seat, and letting a black person sit anywhere on the bus. But both of these are being labelled "DEI" in this thread.

Again, nobody is arguing that the FAA didn't shoot themselves in the foot by introducing a dumb assessment that threw out good candidates. But I think there should be nothing scandalous or wrong with the FAA trying to be available to more candidates.

That isn’t what happened though. What happened was they intentionally turned down highly qualified white applicants. It wasn’t like they found new “diverse” applicants — they actively didn’t hire people that were qualified and happened to be white. They weren’t being “available” to more applicants, they became outwardly hostile to white applicants. They didn’t grow the pie, they moved the pie.

Huge difference.