Weighty Concerns at Work : Many Employees Sweat Rules on What’s ‘Too Fat’

You think your job is tough? Consider how much tougher it would be if every time you clocked in, you had to tuck in your tummy, slither past your supervisor, and pray you didn’t get sent to the scales. Too much dessert and your paychecks might stop.

Ridiculous as it sounds, there are jobs like that, where pounds count as much as performance, where being called “a heavyweight” doesn’t mean you’re good at what you do. It simply means your bosses think you’re too fat to do it.

But how fat is too fat? If you do your job well, should you be disciplined--or even fired--if you happen to be too well fed?

Should you be allowed to gain “a scosh” more girth as you get older, like those blue jeans ads say you inevitably will?

Or should you be forced to remain the same weight for all your working life, as three flight attendants charged in an age and sex discrimination suit filed against American Airlines last week?

And isn’t percentage of body fat a better barometer of fitness than your weight in pounds, anyway?

The answers depend on who you ask.

Los Angeles city firefighters and paramedics are weighed every three months, says Capt. Richard Kampff of the medical liaison unit. If they fail to fall within height-weight ratios set by the department, their body fat is measured in a skin-fold pinch test or with a machine.

Standards are different for men and women, since women “carry their weight and their fat differently than men,” Kampff says. Overweight personnel are put in what is known in the ranks as “The Tub Club,” meaning they must lose a minimum of two pounds a month.

Sounds simple and sensible, right?

Rebecca Hegwer, a Los Angeles city paramedic for 10 years, doesn’t think so.

Hegwer weighed 130 when she joined the department, weighs 215 now, and says she looks “like a very square, very solid little person.” (She is 5 feet 3 inches tall.) She adds that she is athletic, loves her job, performs it well and that none of her supervisors complains about the quality of her work.

On a typical 24-hour work shift, she rushes to aid victims of assaults, shootings, stabbings, car crashes and cardiac arrest. Recently she and her partner climbed down a 70-foot hole to help Metro Rail workers after an accident. She regularly clambers up four flights of tenement stairs to reach people in the downtown area she serves, often carrying a defibrillator, medical kits or oxygen tank. As far as she knows, no one she ever helped has complained that the Angel of Mercy had too much flesh on her wings.

But her bosses say she’s too fat for the job.

Hegwer, her union, and her union lawyer Diane Marchant, disagree. They lost one round in federal court, but on April 11 filed an appeal in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. They say that paramedics should not have to conform to the firefighters’ code since they do not fight fires, that the weight regulation is not uniformly enforced and is not even relevant to the job paramedics do.

Marchant believes there are “all kinds of fitness tests available” to determine whether paramedics are suitable for the job. The tests used by the Los Angeles City Fire Department, she says, do not determine fitness and it is even questionable whether they accurately determine percent of body fat. Marchant says Hegwer is “very short and very round, but she is also very strong. And strength is a primary requirement for the job.”

Fred Hurtado, president of the United Paramedics of Los Angeles, agrees that what’s needed is a different fitness standard that relates to paramedics.

“Quite frankly, the weight standard has been used as a punitive tool by the Fire Department,” the union official says. “When the department itself surveyed firefighters, 25% said they should have been in the weight program but were not put there. What that tells us is that there has been a certain amount of selectivity with respect to who is subjected to the weight-control process.

“If, for example, they don’t like the way you look, or they don’t like the fact that you are involved in union activity, the weight-control program is one possible way to harass you.” (Hegwer is a second vice president of the United Paramedics Union.)

Don Forrest, president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, says the Fire Department needs a “more foolproof system” for evaluating firefighter fitness because the present one doesn’t always work. “We’ve had marathon runners and weightlifters put into the weight clinic, whereas some who really need it never get sent.”

Forrest says immersing a person in water is the most accurate way to evaluate body fat, and whatever test is used should be enforced “across the board, from the department chief to the newest rookie.”

Capt. James Dolan, also of the Fire Department’s medical liaison unit, replies: “Some of the criticisms are not totally unfounded because there is some degree of inaccuracy in almost all body-fat calculation methods. But the LAFD does enforce equally the department standards across all ranks of personnel.”

The Los Angeles Police Department seems more relaxed where weight is concerned. “There are no weight restrictions for males or females in the Los Angeles Police Department,” says Fred Nixon, officer in charge of press relations. “If we had an officer, male or female, whose weight became a hindrance or a detriment, then we would offer that person assistance in getting down to a more healthful weight level. We would not fire or suspend the person due to obesity.”

The United States Army says body circumference counts.

Lt. Col. John S. O’Connor, director of training for the Army’s physical fitness school in Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Ind., explains that a height-weight chart is used as a screening measure. If a person exceeds the chart guidelines, then “we use a circumference system in which we measure the circumference of different parts of the body in order to determine percentage of body fat.

“We don’t put people out of the Army for being overweight. We put them out for being over fat. If you’re 6 feet tall and have 250 pounds of muscle, you’re the kind of guy we like. If you have 140 pounds of fat, then you don’t meet the criterion. The same goes for women. We index our scales by age and sex. We do not expect a 40-year-old female to have the same body-fat composition as a 20-year-old.”

At American Airlines, charged in Los Angeles last week with age and sex discrimination by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, most flight attendants are women. And all flight attendants are required to conform to height/weight standards set in the 1950s by the Metropolitan Life Insurance company.

If a supervisor at American thinks a flight attendant looks heavy on a given day, she can order her to get weighed. If she thinks the attendant has shrunk in height she can tell her to get measured. If she has, (which happens to some women in middle age), then her maximum weight allowance is set even lower, because the chart says the shorter you are, the less you ought to weigh no matter what your age.

Some airlines have no weight regulations at all for their flight attendants. Others raise the weight limit as women get older. A 5-foot-5 flight attendant at United Airlines, for example, can weigh 140 at age 35 and 146 at age 55. But at American, a flight attendant who is 5-foot-5 must weigh no more than 129 pounds for all of her working days.

American flight attendant Patt Gibbs couldn’t believe it. She returned to flight status after a four-year leave of absence in 1988, at the age of 45 with 28 years of flying experience behind her. The Los Angeles woman says she passed all her basic training requirements “with flying colors.” She says she was healthy, felt fit, looked trim. “I am an active, athletic woman. I swim, run, and have a commercial pilot’s license.”

Her supervisor had her weighed, found her too heavy by 29 pounds, and put Gibbs on mandatory personal leave which meant she got no salary, no benefits, no paid health insurance. Gibbs says she was treated like a non-employee.

Flight attendants returning from a leave of absence, like Gibbs, must meet the weight requirement for their height within a specified amount of time, or they can lose their jobs altogether.

“All the pension and benefits you’ve worked so hard for years to build can be yanked away,” Gibbs says. So she did what she says many others in her position have done over the years: Diet to the point of weakness.

Gibbs lost the 29 pounds and returned to flying at 125 pounds, although she says she was weak.

Later, her supervisor ordered her to be measured. Gibbs says medical personnel for the airline asked her to remove her flat shoes and socks and show them the bottoms of her feet. “Basically, they were implying I might be wearing lifts on my soles,” Gibbs says. She was also asked to show identification, implying, Gibbs thinks, that she had sent a skinny stand-in for the height/weight procedure. “They were insinuating ‘not only are you a fat and ugly person, but you may also be a liar and a cheat.’ ”

After measuring, she was told she had shrunk 1/4 of an inch to 5 feet 3 inches, so her weight requirement was lowered to 121 pounds instead of 125. More dieting was needed.

She lost the extra weight, returned to work and eventually filed the lawsuit.

The EEOC suit, in which Gibbs is a plaintiff, was filed, she says, on behalf of all flight attendants returning from leave, whether it be for personal, maternity, educational, union or unpaid sick leave. (Gibbs’ leave was to serve as president of the American flight attendants’ union.)

“American’s policy inhibits women from taking personal leave in order to have kids, go to school or whatever else they may want to do,” Gibbs says, “because it’s possible they may never again be able to meet the company’s appearance standard.” American Airlines’ written policy requires that, in addition to being the approved weight for one’s height, flight attendants must be “free of bulges, rolls or paunches” in order to give “an alert, efficient image.” Mothers returning to work after childbirth are not given enough time to lose weight, Gibbs says.

An American Airlines spokesman said Friday that the “company had just received the lawsuit” and would have no comment.

Attorney Gloria Allred, who is not involved in either lawsuit, says most companies today are “sophisticated, and not foolish enough to engage in blatant age discrimination,” firing people by saying they are too old. “Instead they go off and devise schemes and seemingly nondiscriminatory business justification for terminating older workers.

“But courts can see through those schemes and can determine whether they are simply pretexts for age discrimination.” Allred adds that some companies try to save money by firing older workers who have higher salaries, greater seniority and more benefits.

Some employers just don’t like the way employees look. Victor Valenzuelas, president and business manager of Local 814, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union, says he “remembers vividly” such a case.

A long-time cocktail waitress at an LAX restaurant was “designated overweight” by her employer. Valenzuela says she was “excessively heavy” and the restaurant uniforms were excessively short and revealing. The restaurant owner claimed customers didn’t like what they saw.

The case was taken to arbitration and the waitress won. “The arbitrator ruled she could go back to work with all contractual benefits,” Valenzuela recalls. “But she was so fed up that she decided to change her job.”