After this, I am seriously contemplating adding a new feature to this blog called Airline Outrage of the Week. There seems to be no shortage of material.
Remember Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who punched out of a plane via the emergency slide after supposedly getting fed up with rude passengers?
Well, forget him, and say hello to Kirsten Arianejad of Peoria AZ, until recently a full-time flight attendant for Compass Airlines, a regional carrier based in Minneapolis.
According to the folks at AvStop.com, Compass recently fired Ms. Arianejad because she was featured in a Phoenix TV news story. In it, she said that she had applied for food stamps and had been accepted because…
…wait for it…
…her income was low enough.
Before you go making cracks about “welfare queens,” consider this. To qualify for food stamps in Arizona, you can’t be making more than $1,671 a month. Starting flight attendants for Compass earn no more than $1,278 a month. So this is not a case of welfare fraud. The lady qualified.
With room to spare.
To read the entire story on AvStop,com, click here.
Not surprisingly, the union representing flight attendants is all over this.
So let me see if I’ve got this straight. Compass was embarrassed by Ms. Arianejad’s disclosure of their ridiculously low wages, so they figured that canning her would improve their public image?
Oh. Okay.
How can we pun this? Let me count the ways:
- Compass has lost its bearings
- Compass has lost its way
- Compass’ attempt at damage control has gone badly off-course
- How is Compass going to spin this?
Apparently, someone at this airline has all the public-relations sensibility of a three-toed sloth.
ADDENDUM:
I deeply apologize to any three-toed sloths that may have been offended by this post…