Labour rights get grounded
Flight attendants often make requests of their employers: shift changes, vacation bookings and appeals to work or avoid certain routes.
But one Middle East airline is making waves for its insistence that female employees make an unorthodox request. Qatar Airways demands that its female workers ask for permission to marry.
The airline also insists female employees must tell the company if they become pregnant. If that happens, the worker could be fired, according to a report on Arabianbusiness.com. It hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for Qatar, which is scheduled to host the 2022 World Cup of soccer. The Guardian newspaper also reports that virtual slave labour is being used to build the country’s sports facilities and that dozens of Nepalese migrant workers have died of heat exhaustion.
The airline revelation has stoked outrage at the International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents 4.5 million workers in 150 countries.
That union has sent officials to Canada
Qatar Airways requires female flight attendants to ask permission to marry.
to lobby the International Civil Aviation Organization, Arabbusiness.com said. It’s unclear whether the organization could penalize Qatar Airways for the alleged rights abuse.
Earlier this year, Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker blamed unions for the dispute.
“If you did not have unions you wouldn’t have this jobless problem in the western world. . . . It is caused by unions making companies and institutions uncompetitive and bringing them to a position of not being efficient,” Al Baker told Arabian Business. “If you go and ask the politicians in most of the countries in the western world, they would love to have the system we have: where the workers have rights through the law but they do not have rights through striking and undermining successful institutions that provide jobs,” he added.
Read more stories like this at
thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily