Airline Sued for Weight Discrimination : Workplace: A suit against American on behalf of flight attendants claims that the carrier’s regulations are unfair to older workers.

American Airlines’ Southern California supervisors are attempting to push older, better-paid female flight attendants into retirement by subjectively enforcing a 2-year-old company policy requiring weight checks for those returning from unpaid leaves, federal anti-discrimination attorneys claimed Monday.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said American--the last airline in the United States with inflexible weight rules for flight attendants--is violating federal sex and age discrimination laws.

A broader EEOC lawsuit against American that makes similar claims on behalf of active flight attendants is scheduled to go to trial next year in Dallas.

At issue in both lawsuits is the airline’s refusal to raise its weight limits to account for age. Government attorneys note that both United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, the nation’s second- and third-largest carriers behind American, make such allowances and that some airlines have no weight limits at all. Most airlines that set weight limits, including American, use the 1959 Metropolitan Life Insurance tables, which give weight according to height.

At United, a 5-foot-5 flight attendant can weigh 137 pounds at age 25 and up to 146 at age 55. At American, the standard for the same woman is 129 pounds, regardless of age.

Ralph D. Fertig, supervising trial attorney in the EEOC’s Los Angeles office, said the new lawsuit was filed in response to a policy American adopted in 1988 that required flight attendants returning from leave to have their weight formally checked, as new employees are required to do.

Normally, active American flight attendants are subjected to weight checks only if a supervisor suspects that they have become too heavy, Fertig said. Unlike those returning from leave, the active attendants are permitted to keep flying while they lose weight.

Fertig, two American flight attendants in their 40s and another attendant who was fired for being too heavy told reporters at a news conference Monday that they believe the policy on flight attendants returning from leave is not invoked uniformly and is targeted at older women. Because American and many other airlines began using two-tier wage systems in the 1980s, older employees enjoy substantially higher salaries and benefits.

“This is an economic ploy to get rid of the senior people,” said Patt Gibbs, 47, a former president of the union that represents American’s 17,000 flight attendants. Gibbs said she was required to be weighed after completing an unpaid leave during which she served as union president. When the airline found that she was 29 pounds above her maximum of 125 pounds, she was put on a mandatory leave until she lost the required weight, Gibbs said.

“This is the last bastion,” said Sherri Cappello, 46, alluding to a series of court rulings in the past two decades that have forced airlines to drop requirements that at various times had required flight attendants to be female, single, younger than 33 and childless.

Cappello said she was fired by American last year after 25 years with the company because she could not meet the weight standard after a union leave.

“There are some flight attendants retiring early because they don’t want to be put back on the scale again,” said Cappello, who last month was elected vice president of American’s flight attendants union, the Assn. of Professional Flight Attendants.

An American Airlines spokesman said it would be “inappropriate” to comment because airline officials had yet to see a copy of the lawsuit.

While American will not disclose the number of people who have been terminated for failing to meet overall “grooming” standards, it says 621 flight attendants were disciplined for failing to meet weight standards between 1985 and 1988.

The most recent court ruling on the issue of flight attendants and weight standards was last November, when a federal judge in San Francisco approved a $2.35-million settlement for 115 female flight attendants who had sued Pan American World Airways.

The Pan American attendants’ claim--similar to the one that will be tried in the two American Airlines cases--was that the airline discriminated against women by judging men under the “large” frame weight standard of the Metropolitan Life tables, while judging women under the “medium” frame standard.