Airline must rehire flight attendant who drank before starting work and skipped flight for sex
What are the requirements to be fired in Australia?
Virgin Australia flight attendant Dylan Macnish must be reinstated after an Australian employment tribunal ruled that his dismissal in February 2024 was unfair.
- He must abstain from alcohol for 8 hours after starting work. However, according to the crew member, this was “more of a guideline” than a strict rule. He drank at the airline’s Christmas party less than 8 hours before starting work. However, he claims to have taken a breathalyzer test before starting work.
- He called exhausted, rearranged his schedule and used a dating app to arrange sex, claiming it would help him relax and sleep.
According to the Fair Work Commission, the airline’s reasons for his dismissal are “puzzling” and they have been excessively hard. After all, the airline wouldn’t make a problem if he had called from a flight to have heterosexual sex with his partner rather than having sex on an app (although they certainly would have if they had reason to believe he was staying away from work to have more time for his privacy).
But shouldn’t admitting that you came to work despite violating alcohol policies be grounds for dismissal? Not in Australia.
In 2022, Virgin Australia was ordered to reinstate a flight attendant who had been fired for taking a nap on the job, watching a movie during the flight, arriving late for work, breaching uniform regulations and taking food intended for passengers. According to the government, the decision to fire her was “harsh, unfair and unreasonable”.
On a flight where she was receiving training and was paid to observe the service flow and duties of other crew members, she sat in the last row of the plane watching a movie, “fell asleep and refused to return to a crew seat before the plane landed.” In her defense, she claimed she did not need the training, even though she was unable to work for months due to the pandemic.
Previously, a Qantas flight attendant was paid about A$33,000 after the government ruled that his dismissal was unfair for stealing alcohol and lying about it. The man was a real-life Hunter S. Thompson who was caught with “a can and bottle of beer in his jacket, two 50ml bottles of vodka in his trousers and a 50ml bottle of gin in his pocket.” 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 from an Australian airline?
- The Labor Commission upheld the dismissal of a flight attendant who showed up to work drunk after consuming 14 cocktails, but claimed he was not responsible because he allowed himself to be tempted by a bar’s specialty drinks and because, after a hospital stay, he followed the airline’s instructions to fly home instead of taking his assigned flight.
- Qantas successfully fired a flight attendant who stole alcohol from the plane, got drunk on the job and lied about it. However, the government argued that simply drinking on the job was not enough. The crew member claimed she bought the alcohol herself from the duty-free shop, she continued to work while drunk “so as not to disappoint her colleagues” and 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 that had a standalone question that said, “Do you have employees based in California?”
I lived in California as a teenager and my family was in the auto business there. A mechanic at their shop once cheated on his wife. She confronted him when she found out he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease, so he defended himself with all his might, claiming he had caught the disease on the job – from a spider bite while fixing a car.
It didn’t matter that STDs don’t work that way (they’re called sexually transmitted for a reason). Since he fully embraced the story of the workplace accident with his wife, he had to file for workers’ compensation. Since it was California, he got it.
It turned out that my work model was too provincial for what you should never do in life. I also never want to be an Australian employer.
