A flight attendant demands compensation for discrimination based on her appearance. Aeroflot flight attendants filed a lawsuit against the airline due to discrimination against employees based on age and weight. Is it important for a flight attendant to be fit?
On the Aeroflot website, the requirements for candidates do not indicate any specific wishes regarding appearance or age. In addition to education, having a flight attendant certificate and possessing English language what is required is “the desire to work in the service sector, goodwill, communication skills, responsibility, and discipline.” Judging by the description in the vacancy, the employee must ensure the safety of passengers in flight, serve them, create an atmosphere of hospitality and comfort on board the aircraft.
Compared to vacancies at other international airlines, these requirements look very democratic and sensitive. For example, the Emirates website directly states appearance: a flight attendant must be over 21 years old, taller than 160 centimeters, and have no tattoos on visible parts of the body. In addition, the candidate must have the appearance and physical fitness “that meets the requirements of the airline.” What exactly these requirements are is not specified.
Emirates Airline Crew
The Qatar company is looking for girls over 21 years old with “excellent health and fitness” - that is, not just excellent health, but also fit and athletic.
AirFrance needs flight attendants, again “very fit” and with an excellent level physical training necessary to get the job done.
Perhaps the most tolerant job description is from the American airline Republic Airways: it doesn’t say a word about appearance, it just gives detailed description necessary work.
The flight attendant must be able to move a cart with food and drinks weighing 100 kilograms, assist passengers with seating hand luggage weighing up to 15 kilograms, be able to open emergency exits, applying a force of up to 30 kilograms.
Turkish airlines flight attendant
Is it important for a flight attendant to be fit?
It turns out that many companies around the world openly declare requirements for the appearance of flight attendants. Is this fair? The specifics of their work really require physical strength and endurance, but in fact, “fitness” is not always a guarantee of these qualities.
However, at the end of 2015, the Indian airline Air India has suspended 130 flight attendants for being "too fat to fly." According to the company, “slimmer people respond faster and more effectively to emergency situations.”
This happened after Air India found out the body mass index of its crew members. 600 people out of 3,500 were instructed to lose weight, and those who did not achieve this within six months were redirected to work on the ground.
Do they work in the sky after 40 years?
The job description for a flight attendant at the American company Republic Airways does not say anything about age, but according to the Irish publication Independent, flight attendants work for US airlines up to 60 years of age. The newspaper wrote, for example, about a Virgin Atlantic employee who completed her job on her 60th birthday. At the same time, in the UK, where, according to the publication, it is officially prohibited to set an age limit for flight attendants, those who are not yet 56 are usually considered as candidates for this position.
In Russia, things are a little different. “I almost never saw flight attendants over 50 flying with us. But in foreign companies their age is higher. In Russia, flight attendants are accepted from the age of 18, and in the West, as a rule, after 25-30. There is no age limit in our work; you can fly as long as you pass the medical examination. Another question is that moving to another company after 40 is very problematic,” Inna Seibert, senior flight attendant at Vim-Avia, told RBC Style.
Are the requirements for the appearance and age of flight attendants fair?
A flight attendant is a person who is responsible not only for service, but also for the safety of passengers during the flight. The specifics of the job require that the flight attendant be not only friendly, but also strong and resilient.
“Alas, the requirement for appearance is justified from the point of view of doing business,” explains psychologist and business coach Lyudmila Gorodnicheva. - The success and reputation of the business depends on how well the company’s representatives and their “face” correspond to the image policy. Please note that the requirements for top managers and people working in the luxury sector are even more serious.”
In our culture, success is associated with youth and beauty. Therefore, preference is given to professional, physically strong flight attendants with model appearance. Lawsuits by discriminated against flight attendants are unlikely to change anything overnight. But perhaps this will at least be the first step towards change for the better.
Flight attendant presenter Russian airlines Aeroflot sued the employer for violating their labor rights. The reason for filing the lawsuit was the decision of the airline management that only “young and thin” flight attendants would work on international flights, reports Radio Liberty .
One of the Aeroflot employees, Evgenia Magurina, said that the pretext for collecting data was rebranding and an order new form. Now girls with a clothing size larger than 46 will have to work only on domestic flights, she said.
According to Magurina, the motivational part of the salary of flight attendants consists of several criteria, in particular, the “success” column. “According to the internal document, it states “height for women 160–175, weight proportional to height, clothing size 42–48.” Magurina noted that due to the new rules, flights are carried out with a “minimum number”, since they affected about 400 female workers.
Several more flight attendants filed lawsuits against Aeroflot.
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The president of the regional public organization “Sheremetyevo Trade Union of Flight Attendants” Ilona Borisova told how discrimination against female employees is expressed.
“The flight attendants were forced to take measurements and put everyone on scales. Depending on this and taking into account their age, they were distributed according to directions. Thus, our youngest and most attractive girls fly without restrictions to all destinations, especially abroad. And those who our leadership doesn’t like operate short flights around Russia. This also leads to discrimination against passengers: some fly and admire beautiful but inexperienced girls, others are accompanied by not the youngest, but experienced flight attendants,” noted Ilona Borisova.
The head of the flight attendants' union emphasized that thus the amount of pay for flight attendants at Aeroflot began to depend on the size of her clothes: the smaller the size, the higher the salary.
There are accruals for the so-called personal contribution - this is an incentive payment that directly depends on the size of clothing. Having in hand such a mechanism as the distribution of flight attendants according to directions, it is very easy to shift this dependence to wages. After all, there is a big difference between completing 4 long flights per month and thus fulfilling the monthly flight requirement, or many short flights, but at the same time the norm will not be met. One of the criteria for calculating incentive payments is an annual flight time of 600 hours. If a person does not meet the monthly flying requirement, then he also does not meet the annual flying requirement,” said Ilona Borisova.
Aeroflot flight attendants, outraged by the airline's policies, filed a lawsuit against it, accusing the employer of violating labor rights and discriminating against employees appearance, weight and age. According to women, the airline has recently begun to get rid of flight attendants over 40 years of age and larger than size 46, Radio Liberty reports.
As flight attendant of the highest category Evgenia Magurina, who has been working at Aeroflot since 2010, explained with her example, until recently she was a senior flight attendant, flew mainly abroad and received incentives from management for Good work, however, since last summer everything has changed.
“We were all told that now only the young and thin would fly abroad at Aeroflot. We were all photographed and measured en masse, some were even weighed - this was done under the pretext of rebranding the airline and ordering new uniforms for employees. Everyone who was over 40 and those who have clothes larger than size 46 are no longer allowed on foreign flights,” the woman said.
According to Aeroflot employees, in the “struggle for slimness,” uniforms in sizes 50-52 were removed from the airline’s warehouse, and VLEK (medical flight expert commission) doctors, as part of a course on rejuvenation, were instructed to look for any excuse for dismissing “old, fat, scary" flight attendants.
“The flight attendants, trying to fit into the new criteria, fainted from hunger right in the control room, but even if they lost weight, they were told that they still wouldn’t fly to America or the Dominican Republic because they were too old. to the STS group, out of 90 possible flight hours, they left some with 60 and some with 40,” said another flight attendant named Natalya.
The official manual for Aeroflot flight attendants does not say a word about what size clothes they should wear. “Uniforms must be clean, ironed, tidy and kept in impeccable condition, all its elements must be carefully tailored to the figure,” follows from the airline’s official document.
Aeroflot employees also told reporters that the “course of weight loss and rejuvenation” began after CEO airline Vitaly Savelyev returned from a trip to Asia, after which they came up with a new “standard”. “The boss liked Asian girls, and now when recruiting for business class, priority is given to tall, slender girls of the oriental type, preferably models,” say the employees.
According to them, other “wishes” have recently appeared at the airline: for example, flight attendants working in business class were asked to be especially attentive to VIP clients and listen to their requests while squatting.
The President of the Sheremetyevo Union of Flight Crews, Igor Deldyuzhov, in turn, explained that there are a lot of complaints about discrimination due to age and appearance, but most flight attendants are afraid to go to court because they either have small children whom they are raising alone, or mortgage, or other personal circumstances.
“As a result, flight safety, which is talked about a lot, is replaced with a beautiful wrapper, because international flights They place only young people, not experienced ones. Meanwhile in difficult situation the decision must be made instantly: for example, during emergency landing on an Aeroflot plane in Dubai in September 2001, none of the passengers were injured, largely thanks to the clear actions of the flight attendants, who, by the way, were all adults. Now these women would probably be classified as “old” and would not be allowed on such flights,” he noted.
Aeroflot flight attendant Evgenia Magurina stated in court that she was discriminated against by the airline. According to Ms. Magurina, who wears a size 52 uniform, she lost part of her earnings due to internal requirements for cabin crew, in which flight attendant clothing sizes are limited to size 48. Representatives of the independent trade union say that about 600 more flight attendants have "identified discrimination against them based on their appearance." Aeroflot denies the claims.
On Thursday, the Presnensky District Court of Moscow began considering the claim of 41-year-old Evgenia Magurina against Aeroflot about discrimination based on appearance and the resulting reduction in earnings. The flight attendant is appealing the internal act - the requirements for cabin crew, which the airline referred to when removing Mrs. Magurina's service allowance. “The airline did not show me this document; I had to get it through the trade union,” Ms. Magurina told the judge. According to her, the document states that the flight attendant must be clothing sizes 42–48 and under 40 years of age. Evgenia Magurina has been size 52 “for a long time now.”
Representatives of Aeroflot stated at the trial that the plaintiff signed documents in 2011 to familiarize herself with the requirements for cabin crew, concluding that the deadline for filing a claim had expired. The flight attendant explained that she signed the papers, but did not see the internal act itself, otherwise she would have appealed it earlier. As a result, the court ordered Aeroflot to provide the document by the next hearing.
Evgenia Magurina told Kommersant that in the summer of 2016, Aeroflot photographed, weighed and measured the figures of flight attendants. Representatives of the administration said that we are talking about sewing a new uniform, but so far, according to the plaintiff, it has not been issued. “And from August 15, my flight geography changed dramatically: instead of America, I started flying to Samara, Ufa, Kazan - not a single foreign flight until mid-January,” says Mrs. Magurina. “Then the scandal had already appeared in the media, and Aeroflot staged me on a flight to Karaganda.” The flight attendant claims that her salary was reduced in stages. “The first time was when foreign flights were closed because there is an extra charge for crossing the border, in particular for America - 3 thousand rubles,” says the plaintiff. “In October, part of the extra charge for clothing size was removed. The official response from management says: since your clothing size is not 48, measures to reduce your wages have been applied to you. And the last time, in January of this year, when I filed a claim, I was deprived of my bonus for being removed from my position as a senior flight attendant.” In the lawsuit, Ms. Magurina demands compensation in the amount of 100 thousand rubles.
The head of the independent trade union “Sheremetyevo Trade Union of Flight Attendants” (provides legal support to the plaintiff), Ilona Borisova, indicated that the airline adopted internal requirements in 2011, but began to apply them only recently. “Before this, no one was interested in wide butts and thick cheeks,” she said, emphasizing that about 600 Aeroflot flight attendants “turned to the trade union and, like Evgenia Magurina, identified discrimination against themselves based on their appearance.”
The airline’s website posted an official comment regarding the scandalous situation: “Motives of personal hostility, especially external data or the age of the employee as a justification for depriving him of part of his earnings are categorically excluded.” The airline claims that it did not limit the flight attendant’s geography of flights, and the statement about the existing attitude to write off the “old and terrible” is not true: “In 2016, the medical commission allowed 98 flight attendants of retirement age to fly and only four flight attendants aged 56 to 60 years and older people are not admitted due to health reasons.” “The flight attendants of the national carrier are the calling card of the country. The way they look and how they serve passengers forms the first impression and attitude towards Russia,” the company said.
Ms. Borisova nevertheless claims that the reduction in bonuses is forcing flight attendants to quit. “Another way to get rid of it is to transfer flight attendants to morning and night flights, the heaviest,” she says. “I’ve been working like this at Aeroflot for two years. Another flight attendant also worked like this for two years and filed a lawsuit against the airline.” As Kommersant learned, we are talking about Irina Ierusalimskaya, the hearing of her claim is scheduled in the Tushinsky Court of Moscow on April 18.
Representatives of the independent trade union are optimistic about Ms. Magurina’s chances in court. “In 2009–2010, the airline went through a massive downsizing, about 360 people were fired,” said Ms. Borisova. “Only four went to court and eventually won, being reinstated in their jobs and receiving compensation of about 1 million rubles. at everyone for forced downtime.”
Anastasia Kurilova
