An airline has been ordered to rehire a flight attendant who drank before starting work and missed a flight because of sex.

by Gary Leff August 21, 2024

What does it take to get licensed in Australia?

Virgin Australia flight attendant Dylan Macnish is to be reinstated after an Australian employment tribunal ruled her dismissal in February 2024 was unfair.

He is required to abstain from drinking alcohol for eight hours before his shift. But according to the crew member, it was “more of a directive” than a strict policy. He drank at the airline’s Christmas party less than eight hours before his shift. But he says he checked his blood alcohol level before boarding his flight.
He exclaimed tired, postponed his date and used a dating app to arrange sex. He claimed it would help him relax and sleep.

The Fair Work Commission said the airline’s reasons for sacking him were “confusing” and were too hard. After all, if he had called from a flight to have heterosexual sex with his spouse rather than sex via a dating app, the airline wouldn’t have made an issue of it (although if they had reason to believe he was choosing not to work in order to prioritize his personal time, they certainly would have made an issue of it).

But surely admitting to showing up to work in breach of an alcohol policy should be grounds for dismissal? Not in Australia.

In 2022, Virgin Australia was ordered to reinstate a flight attendant who had been fired for napping on the job, watching an in-flight movie, arriving late for work and violating uniform standards, and taking food intended for passengers. The government said the decision to fire her was “harsh, unfair and unreasonable.”

On a flight where she was in training and was paid to observe the flow of duty and the duties of other crew members, she sat in the back row of the plane and watched a movie, “fell asleep and refused to return to a crew seat until the plane landed.” In her defense, she claimed she did not need training despite being off work for months due to the pandemic.

A Qantas flight attendant was once awarded $33,000 in compensation after the government said it was unfair to fire him after he stole alcohol and lied about it. The man was a real-life Hunter S. Thompson, found with “a can and a bottle of beer in his jacket, two 50ml bottles of vodka in his trousers and a 50ml bottle of gin in his bag”. He claimed not to know how the beer in his jacket and the vodka in his trousers got there.

So what does it take to actually get fired by an airline in Australia?

The labor board has upheld the firing of a flight attendant who showed up to work drunk after 14 cocktails, but said he should not be held liable because he was tempted by a bar’s drink specials and because he followed the airline’s instructions to go home rather than work his assigned flight after being hospitalized.
Qantas has successfully fired a flight attendant who stole alcohol on board, got drunk on the job and lied about it. However, the government suggested that simply drinking on the job would not have been enough. The cabin crew member claimed she bought the alcohol herself at a duty-free store, continued to work while intoxicated “to avoid disappointing her colleagues” and that the dismissal was disproportionate to the offence.

One of the last things I ever wanted in my professional life was to be a California employer. I had to fill out insurance applications at work with the one question: “Do you have any employees based in California?”

I lived in California as a teenager and my family worked in the automotive industry there. One day, a mechanic at their repair shop cheated on his wife. She confronted him when she found out he had an STD. So he called Shaggy Defense claiming he got it at work – from a spider bite while he was fixing a car.

It didn’t matter, that’s not how STDs work (they’re called sexually transmitted for a reason). Since he was fully engaged in the work accident story with his wife, he had to file for workers’ compensation. Since it was California…he got it.

It turns out my working model of what not to do in life was too provincial. I don’t want to be an Australian employer either.

An airline has been ordered to rehire a flight attendant who drank before starting work and missed a flight because of sex.

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