Alaska Airlines is increasingly using popular social media sites like Instagram and TikTok to find flight attendants breaking strict uniform rules and has recently spotted crew members wearing yoga pants while on duty.
In a recent memo to thousands of flight attendants at the Seattle-based carrier, the official flight attendant union said it “highly discouraged” its members from wearing yoga pants rather than their standard uniform designed by Luly Yang.
Explaining why expensive Lululemo or Alo athleisure wear wasn’t a reasonable replacement for official uniform garments, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) explained: “You will be out the money and may also face progressive disciplinary action during uniform checks.”
“Management has initiated a uniform coalition, and uniform checks will be increasing across all workgroups in the near future,” the memo warned.
The decision to ramp up uniform spot checks, as well as targeting social media, comes just months after a flight attendant was terminated for publicly posting a video of herself twerking onboard an Alaska Airlines plane just before passengers boarded.
Along with the risque dancing, Alaska Airlines is said to have been frustrated with the way sacked flight attendant Nelle Diala presented herself in the designer uniform, wearing knee-high boots and a YvesSaintLaurent handbag slung across her chest.
In 2023, Alaska Airlines was forced to relax its uniform guidelines, specifically over its male and female uniform guidelines, allowing crew members to wear garments from either collection, regardless of their gender.
The decision came after Alaska Airlines entered into a consent decree with the Washington State Attorney General’s office following a lengthy legal battle from a flight attendant who identifies as non-binary.
Justin Wetherell objected to the airline’s insistence that staffers comply with uniform standards based on either a ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ look, such as banning employees with facial hair from wearing female garments or forbidding crew members dressed in male garments from wearing lip gloss.
Along with allowing employees to mix and match uniform items and making a universal set of grooming standards, the airline also started to issue flight attendants pronoun pin badges and introduced new equality training for all workers.
In the same year, Virgin Atlantic voluntarily changed its uniform rules, ditching traditional gender-based rules and allowing crew members to wear either the ‘male’ or ‘female’ uniforms – renamed as the ‘red’ and ‘burgundy’ uniforms to signify that they were no longer gender specific.
Months after introducing the landmark change, however, Virgin Atlantic was forced to concede that the gender-neutral rules only applied when crew were working on flights to just two countries – the United States and Israel.
Following extensive risk assessments, on flights to all other destinations, including across the Caribbean, Africa, and India, cabin crew must wear a uniform that matches the gender recorded in their passport.
