Persian Gulf Airlines Groom New, Global Flight Crews: Etihad, Emirates and Qatar Attract International Employees, Criticism for Some Labor Practices

The Wall Street Journal
By Scott McCartney

Dec. 3, 2014 5:43 p.m. ET

Abu Dhabi

To drill the importance of innovation into its class of 30 flight attendants from five continents, an Etihad Airways employee flashed a picture of Steve Jobs on the screen in a conference room at the company’s training academy here.

The message was that the iPhone “won its market” and Etihad can do the same with innovation and service, the instructor said. “Yes, you are cabin crew. But at the end of the day, you are our sales executives onboard.”

But the method was just as important. “English is not their first language, but iPhone is. It’s common to everybody,” said Aubrey Tiedt, Etihad’s Irish-born vce president of guest services, who oversees training.

Persian Gulf airlines are shaking up the airline industry and its customers by offering high-quality service, often at lower prices than competitors. They are doing it in part by attracting employees from all corners of the globe, many of them from impoverished, low-wage areas. The workers live under close supervision in company housing in the United Arab Emirates or Qatar, work long hours and abide by contract terms that other parts of the world find objectionable. All three Gulf airlines—Etihad, Qatar and Emirates—may fire women if they become pregnant.

“We offer a tremendous opportunity, and if people don’t like it, they don’t have to give notice if they want to leave us,” Ms. Tiedt says.

Training employees to react as a team in an emergency is one of the great challenges of the globalized airline industry. The Persian Gulf airlines operate in English, but it’s the second language for almost all their workers. New hires typically must live with someone from another country to avoid segregating into cliques or lapsing into native language instead of honing English skills.

Eleven-year-old Etihad revamped its training program two years ago to include far more visual learning for employees from 113 different countries. Interactive computer programs force students to set a business-class dinner table the way the airline prescribes, for example, by clicking and dragging pictures instead of reading instructions.

And to make sure workers are learning, Etihad and its larger rivals have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in full-motion simulators for flight attendants, not just cockpit simulators for pilots. All airlines train in cabin mock-ups. Most don’t spend the way these three carriers have on full-motion modules that can simulate airplane movements and create turbulence, pour smoke into a cabin and light fires in overhead storage bins or other airplane areas. The sensation of a bad landing with the collapse of a nose wheel or even a landing where the plane rolls onto its side can be created, and trainees have to open aircraft emergency doors from awkward positions.

“If there’s a fire, I need you to act.…On board, you might panic or freeze. But not if you’ve done it before,” says Ms. Tiedt.

Emirates, the largest of the Gulf carriers and now the fourth-largest airline in the world by passenger traffic, says it receives about 400,000 applications a year for jobs across the company. The airline’s employees span 143 nationalities. Most new hires are in their mid-20s. Many have had a prior job in hotels, restaurants or even other airlines and understand basic principles of customer service.

But just like any workplace, crew members can disagree and bicker among themselves. On a recent Emirates flight to the U.S., the crew came from 20 different countries and spoke 22 languages. Asked if they all got along, a flight attendant smiled. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Today it’s OK. There was no trouble,” he says.

Gulf airlines say they offer a rare chance for workers around the globe: pay that’s competitive with other airlines, enticing benefits and travel. Salaries are tax-free in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and housing, utilities, transportation to work, health care and uniforms are free or heavily subsidized. The housing is typically a two-bedroom apartment shared by two new hires in a secure compound—better than camps where construction workers typically live in Qatar and the U.A.E., but still criticized by U.S. and European airline labor unions as confinement. (The airlines say it isn’t confinement, but simply a way to keep employees safe.)

In general, workers are expected to put in longer hours than is typical of established rivals in Europe and North America. “We don’t have restrictive work limits,” says Terry Daly, Emirates’ senior vice president for service delivery.

All airlines have to follow minimum rules set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, but regulators in the U.S. and Europe impose greater limits on crews, especially pilots, and many airlines have union contracts with even stricter rules to combat fatigue. Airlines follow the rules of their home country, regardless of where they fly.

The differences often are small on paper, and the Gulf airlines have the advantage of long flights where employees are more likely to put in a full day in the air. Other airlines have employees waiting between shorter flights more often. Qatar says its flight attendants work 90 to 100 hours of flying time a month, with eight days off. United Airlines’ contract with its flight attendants allows for a maximum of 95 hours flying a month with 10 days off. But other contract terms on vacation, rest and rescheduling can give United flight attendants more time off.

Gulf airlines say they study fatigue closely, schedule crews carefully and operate within accepted safety limits. On a recent 16-hour flight from Dubai to Dallas-Fort Worth, pilots and flight attendants got about the same amount of rest U.S. crews would get. The Emirates A380 carried two captains (one Australian, the other Indian) and two co-pilots (one from Malta and the other Ireland), each flying for eight hours. Flight attendants, from Asia, Europe, Africa and other regions, changed into their own Emirates-issued pajamas for rest periods.

Unions in Europe and the U.S., fearing job losses to the fast-growing airline rivals, have criticized the rivals’ work rules and government support. The International Transport Federation, a major union, filed a complaint earlier this year over Qatar Airways with a United Nations group called the International Labour Organization, which has been pressuring the government in Qatar.

“These are discriminatory battles we fought and won decades ago, and it’s a concern they are still in place today,” says Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, the largest U.S. flight attendants union.

At Emirates, an employee who becomes pregnant in her first three-year contract must resign and can return later to the company, Mr. Daly says. Etihad will let pregnant crew members fly for the first three months, but then they have to leave or move into a ground job, if available, Ms. Tiedt says. Qatar says a pregnant crew member must immediately notify the company of the pregnancy and resign because the company doesn’t consider working in the air while pregnant safe. The employee can move to a ground job if one is available.

All three Gulf airlines say women sign contracts to work for them knowing the pregnancy policy, and the companies expect them to work once the airline has invested in their training. Qatar’s chief executive, Akbar Al Baker, dismissed criticism of working conditions as gripes from disgruntled former employees and unions. “We give people very good work conditions,” he says.

Employees do need company permission to marry during their first five years on the job, though he says that’s a formality. The company does monitor entrances at housing with cameras and visitors are recorded. “Records are for the safety of my girls,” Mr. Al Baker says. He also notes he was the first in the region to hire female pilots and now has more than 100 female pilots at his airline.

In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration says it has no restrictions on pregnant flight attendants as long as they can physically perform their duties. AFA’s Ms. Nelson notes U.S. employers can’t legally discriminate against someone for being pregnant, and the union fought for accommodations such as maternity uniforms and pregnancy leave.

Qatar’s salaries for cabin crew start at $24,000 a year tax-free, fairly close to the norm in the U.S. and Europe. Captains start at a very competitive $200,000 a year and first officers at $130,000 a year.

Emirates defends its work rules by noting that 11,000 of its 53,000 employees have been with the company for 10 years or more. Even though many pilots laid off at U.S. and European airlines in the last recession found work with the fast-growing Gulf carriers, there hasn’t been a mass exodus of pilots when hiring resumed in the U.S. and Europe, Mr. Daly says.

Etihad tries to bridge the cultural divides by uniting workers around the airline itself as an identity. The seven weeks of new-hire training and recurrent training includes education about the airline industry, Etihad’s history and how the airline can capitalize on malaise at competitors with enthusiastic service. “If they don’t understand the business, it just becomes robotic,” Ms. Tiedt says.

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