American Airlines CEO Doug Parker said his company has publicly condemned election integrity laws in Georgia and Texas to please “black executives” and the NAACP.
“Our view is that we’re not getting involved on political issues,” Parker said after opposing Republican-led election integrity laws. “This is not us looking to pick one side of a bipartisan issue; it’s us looking to pull people together.”
Parker’s comments came in response to a question from Free Enterprise Project Deputy Director Scott Shepard at the annual American Airlines shareholder meeting, the National Center for Public Policy Research reported.
Shepard asked Parker to outline the specific reasons that Americans Airlines denounced the election-integrity legislation in Texas and to “suggest specific substitute proposals that will still ensure that Texas elections are free of fraud and error.”
Parker immediately softened his company’s statement by admitting that Texas legislators did not introduce the bill to prevent people from voting.
“That legislation was put forward as an effort to increase voter integrity, to allay concerns about the lack of voter integrity—obviously something that all Americans favor: ensuring that votes do have a high level of integrity,” he said.
“The problem with that legislation, though, is, in trying to help integrity, it also is making it much harder for people to vote and indeed for certain groups of people to vote,” he added.
Despite the claim, Parker could not describe how the law made voting more difficult.
Rather, he said the law made some people “feel disenfranchised.”
He said American Airlines decided to submit to the woke mob, even though the company itself had no reason to condemn voter-integrity laws.
“We began to hear about it from black CEOs around the country, black executives around the country, and our view is—and will continue to be—that we need to support our team,” Parker said. “Our team came forward and let us know that this was really important to them, and they know that American Airlines has a voice in this regard.”
Parker said major corporations will stop injecting themselves into American politics when conservatives “don’t generate large concerns” from groups like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
As long as conservatives offend the NAACP, however, American Airlines and mega-corporations like it will spring into action.
Despite the company’s support for far-left groups, Parker described American Airlines political opinions as middle-of-the-road and conciliatory.
“What we do is bring people together; we’re trying to bring people together on this point, on what is clearly a divisive point,” Parker said in description of the company’s policy on speaking about politics. “Again, not picking one side of the divider point. Trying to get people to work together.”
Shepard showed, however, that American Airlines supports and spreads wokeness and does not try to “bring people together.”
“American has been requiring employees to attend training sessions in which the company encourages expressions of wokeness, while making clear that any expressions in opposition to wokeness will put employees’ jobs in danger,” he said.
“As long as that’s true, American is determining in advance which of these ‘team members’ get a say, and which are silenced,” he continued. “And so Parker’s claim that company executives are only doing what their ‘team’ demands is a choreographed lie.”
