Chinese airlines have been chastised for imposing a tight weight restrictions on female flight attendants.
Flight attendants working for Hainan Airlines will be suspended immediately if their weight exceeds the “standard limit” by 10%, according to Chinese official media.
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Haikou Airport in China, is guilty of this absurd rule. The Chinese airline has been chastised for setting tight weight limitations on female flight attendants under a new policy.
According to the state tabloid Global Times, Hainan Airlines published directives to its cabin crew earlier this month indicating that female flight attendants would be automatically grounded if their weight exceeded the “standard limit” by 10%.
The rules contained a formula for calculating the limit based on height and stated that suspended flight attendants would be placed on a company-supervised “weight reduction plan.” The airline that is According to the report, the airline, which is one of the largest in China, also underlined the importance of female flight attendants’ beauty for the company’s image.
The instructions sparked uproar online, as well as legal problems. Liu Tao, a labor law and civil rights lawyer in Dalian, China, told NBC News that the airline’s policy was “very inappropriate and obviously illegal in China” and could constitute job discrimination.
Although China had national legislation enabling weight requirements for flight attendants, it was repealed in 2001, according to Liu. “This weight standard could only be legitimized if Hainan Airlines asked for every employee’s agreement in advance with signed notifications and consent forms,” he explained.
Requests for comment were not returned by Hainan Airlines. Rachel Liu, a flight attendant at another Chinese carrier, stated that while the Hainan Airlines standards infuriated her and her colleagues, they had encountered similar expectations at their previous workplaces.
“Almost all airlines would prefer thin female flight attendants, and some overweight women cannot pass the interviews,” she wrote in a text message. She questioned the desire for just slender female cabin workers, claiming that “they can’t even help passengers put their luggage away.”
Chinese social media users slammed the regulations as “unnecessary” and “ridiculous.” Some flight attendants in other airlines took to social media to say “I require flight attendants who have professional and safety knowledge, as well as those who wear appropriate clothing and shoes for dealing with emergencies incidents. “I don’t care about their weight,” read one response on Weibo, the Chinese counterpart of Twitter.
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Though Chinese domestic carriers are going on a hiring binge as travel recovers with the lifting of “Zero-Covid” restrictions, the lawyer Liu Tao claims that China “has long lagged behind in developing an overarching regulatory framework” that applies consistently to the whole business.
Employees of Hainan Airlines, he said, may file a complaint requesting the firm to withdraw the guidelines, or they might seek arbitration and compensation if fired for breaking them. “Under this condition, the employees are very likely to win the case,” he stated.
