Another battle won

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, November 27, 2011

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The HinduEqual at last... Photo: V. Sudershan

The Supreme Court clears the way for women to become In-Flight Supervisors in Air India. Thanks to those women who believed in and fought for equality at the workplace.

This judgment passed virtually without comment. The media ignored it. Why should the rights of a relatively small group of women concern the rest of us? Yet the November 17 Supreme Court judgment, by Justices Altamas Kabir and Cyriac Joseph, upholding Air India's 2005 decision to remove the precondition that an In Flight Supervisor could only be a male, and that women cabin crew could also be appointed to that position, is significant.

The troubled airline has not been a shining example of gender equity. Yet, finally wisdom dawned and it did accept that there was no justification for a rule that held a particular job only for men when the men and women on flights had the same training and did virtually identical tasks.

Expected resistance

What is fascinating about this case is the manner in which the male cabin crew opposed the new rule and challenged it in court. In 2007, the Delhi High Court upheld Air India's right to make this change and held that it saw nothing wrong in the rule. That judgment is worth reading in its entirety as it spells out the history of the struggles of women cabin crew in Air India to assert their right to equal treatment. There have been innumerable court cases, on issues ranging from a different retirement age for male and female crew members to a rule at one point where women who became pregnant within four years of being appointed had to quit to one where women cabin crew were grounded if they exceeded a certain weight.

It is hard to fathom why a ‘national' airline should lag so behind the times on these issues. The women employed by Air India have had to turn to the courts on all these issues. These were not battles for additional powers. The women were simply asserting that they should have the same rights as other employees in a country where equality is guaranteed and where one is working for a ‘national' airline that ostensibly wishes to promote India's ‘national' image.

This last battle, to get the airline to remove the anomaly where a particular job was virtually kept as a ‘male only' designation for no reason at all, was in some ways the strangest. Senior women cabin crew members of Air India, some of whom trained other cabin crew members including men, had to contend with serving under the same men they had trained simply because, regardless of seniority or experience, they could never get the designation of In-Flight Supervisor. Even after private airlines came on the scene where there was no discrimination between male and female cabin crew, Air India persisted. And when it finally changed the rule, the male cabin crew objected, calling this positive change “discriminatory” and challenged it in Court.

In 2007, the Delhi High Court was quite clear in its ruling. It stated:

“The Court finds that IFS (In-Flight Supervisor) is no longer a post, much less a promotional post. It is a function that one among the cabin crew, on the basis of seniority, is asked to perform during the flight. This Court is unable to discern in any of the settlements any assurance or promise held out to the pre-1997 male cabin crew that a female colleague of theirs will never ever be asked to perform the function of an IFS. Nor do the judgments of the Supreme Court say so. The impugned order dated 27.12.2005 is not discriminatory to the male cabin crew. In fact, far from eliminating the possibility of the male cabin crew performing the function of IFS, it provides a chance to their female colleagues as well. In effect it removes the ‘ men only' tag on the function of IFS. We are asked by the pre-1997 male cabin crew to hold this to be unreasonable. We decline to do so. This Court finds nothing arbitrary, unreasonable or irrational in the pre-1997 male cabin crew being asked to serve on a flight which has their female colleague as an IFS. This then is the jist of the lengthy judgment that follows.” (http://delhicourts.nic.in/Oct07/ Rajendra%20Grover%20Vs.% 20Air%20India%20Ltd..pdf.) (LPA Nos. 122-125 of 2006, Date of Decision: October 8, 2007.)

Representatives of the male cabin crew had argued that they would not work under women, even if they were senior. The job had been promised only to men and they were determined to hang on to it. And women could not claim the right to equality in this matter because the job of a woman on flight and a man on flight were substantially different, they argued. Yet passengers on flights can observe for themselves that the men and women in the cabin crew do exactly the same things — welcome you, make announcements about safety regulations, serve you food and drink, clear up after you, help anyone needing help, remain alert in case there is an emergency and act if such an occasion should arise.

Catching up

All this is so obvious that it does not need repeating. Yet, none of this convinced the flight pursers employed by Air India who challenged the Delhi High Court judgment. The Supreme Court ruling, one hopes, has settled the matter and Air India will now be permitted to join the 21st century. And perhaps it will finally also decide to use gender-neutral terms to describe the men and women who are part of the cabin crew.

The court battles fought by women cabin crew of Air India are significant for other reasons. Many of the women who went to court could just have sat back and accepted conditions as they prevailed. After all, they had a secure job and a reasonable salary. But because some of them took the risk of even losing their jobs and challenged these discriminatory provisions, those who join the airline now will be much better placed than their seniors. The lesson these battles hold out is that discrimination does not disappear on its own and that managements are not struck by a sudden realisation that they should be fair to their employees. Positive change is more often than not the result of battles fought by those who believe strongly in equity and justice.

(To read the original, click on the link below)

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Kalpana_Sharma/article2659397.ece

Only pretty girls can fly

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, September 18, 2011

The HinduBehind the glamour: It's a hard grind... Photo: Rajeev Bhatt

Why is it that our national carrier continues to have separate rules for men and women who work as flight attendants?

“AI may go for younger cabin crew to lure flyers”, read a headline on September 12 (Times of India). The first paragraph of the story could not have been more blatantly sexist: “Flight attendants on Air India could soon stop reminding you of the elderly and portly headmistress who rarely smiled at you in school. And they could be more nattily dressed.”

So while the rest of the world moves ahead, our national carrier remains stuck in a time warp. At a time when it cannot pay its 30,000 employees their salaries on time, when the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) has castigated it for going ahead and ordering additional aircraft when it carried an incredible Rs. 40,000 crores debt burden, Air India believes that nicer looking ‘air hostesses' — a term that Air India continued to use long after the rest of the world had adopted the gender neutral term, ‘flight attendant', will somehow make thousands of passengers rush towards the floundering airline.

Persisting story

The story of the ‘Maharaja' and its women employees is an old one.  Ever since Air India became India's national airline in 1953, when the airline owned by the Tatas since 1932 was nationalised, women flight attendants have had to fight against the different set of rules applied to them.  From a time when they could be employed only up to the age of 35, and would have to quit if they became pregnant, it has been a long and tough journey to get the airline to acknowledge that there is something called gender equity. The legal battles have raged over decades, making their way up to the Supreme Court. Some were won. Some lost.

Whatever one might think of Air India, its service, its performance or its crew, the gender battles in the airline illustrate the struggle women in the service industry have to wage to be recognised as equals. For instance, in Air India, while women had to be a certain weight for a certain age, the same rule did not apply to the male employees. Why? Women, regardless of the years of service they put in, could not be promoted beyond a certain point. Men could. Why? Women had to retire at a certain age or take up ground jobs while men could continue to serve in the cabins up to the age of 58. Why? These are some of the questions that were at the heart of many of the battles fought within Air India.

Performance, not looks

And most of all, why do those who run airlines believe that their airline will be considered more attractive if they have pretty women serving the passengers? People's choice — and now in India we have a choice — of the airline they fly depends most of all on the airline's safety record, then its on-time performance, the cleanliness of the craft, the comfort of the seats, the quality of the food served and, of course, the quality of the service on board.  Is the crew responsive, efficient, kind to older people and children and trained to deal with emergencies? How they look is the last on this list.  These criteria apply equally to the men and women who work as flight attendants. Yet, only women's looks are constantly emphasised. 

What are the attributes needed to qualify for the job of flight attendant? Here is a description posted on a job website:

“The aspiring candidates should have a few exceptional qualities within them — sense of responsibility, pleasing personality, presence of mind, initiative, good physique, patience to work long hours, systematic approach towards duty, good appearance, communication and interactive skills, language proficiency, pleasant voice, team spirit, positive attitude, sense of humour and so on.” And, “Apart from the physical and other attributes mentioned above, the candidate should also have a lot of stamina, patience, common sense, presence of mind and the strength to keep her poise in the face of a crisis. An outgoing personality and a bit of luck always help.”

The majority of the requirements have to do with attitude and with qualities such as “patience”, “systematic approach, “positive attitude”, “sense of humour” and “pleasing personality”. In the middle of all this is also “good physique” and “good appearance”. In fact, behind the glamour, the job is a hard grind and requires a high level of fitness. But should this be translated into every candidate for the job, particularly if she happens to be a woman, looking like an aspiring model?

In 2004, when Air India decided to recruit 400 new flight attendants — and 32,000 people applied — those with pimples or scars on their faces were turned away and not given a chance to prove that they might have “a pleasing personality” or even common sense and patience. Two years ago, when Air India dismissed 10 women flight attendants for being “too fat to fly”, according to a newspaper headline, one of them, who had worked for 27 years with the airline pointed out, “This is not a modelling job; we are not working a catwalk” and added, “weight is not an infectious disease”.

Furthermore, no matter how good-looking your staff, your company cannot survive just on that. This too should be obvious, particularly in the case of Air India. It is not the weight or looks of its cabin crew that have steered it into this current crisis; it is the quality of management that has. Indian Airlines, before it merged with Air India, had the same rules for men and women. And regardless of the age of its crew or how they looked, the airline remained afloat.

Looking smart and having a “pleasing personality” are necessary requirements for anyone who is in the service industry, including those who manage front offices and have to deal with people. But none of this means there should be separate sets of rules for men and women. Air India needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

(To read the original, click on the link http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Kalpana_Sharma/article2458911.ece)