Can you name the employee with the longest service at your company? Probably not. But ask some flight attendants that question: Odds are they will know where they - and their colleagues - stand in the seniority pecking order.
"Everybody knows who's No. 1," declares Connie Snider, a 27-year veteran of UAL Corp.'s United Airlines. "It's like identifying who is president." At the airlines, says Snider (who ranks an even No. 1,800 among United's 18,200 flight attendants), "your whole life revolves around seniority."Seniority has ascended to new heights at United, the airline that invented "air hostesses" back in 1930, thanks to a handful of long-in-the-tooth long-timers. Margaret "Jo" Humbert, who started at United predecessor Pennsylvania Central Airlines, will celebrate a half-century in the cabin next month and is the undisputed No. 1. Next is Iris Peterson, who started with United in August 1946, followed by Loretta Burke, who became a United flight attendant in 1948. (No. 4, and the senior of the carrier's 2,500 male attendants, is Ron Akana, who got his wings in 1950.)
Most fly United's coveted international routes and show no signs of tiring of jet lag, dry cabin air and demanding passengers. Asked when she'll retire, Peterson says, "When my body tells me it's time," declining to disclose her age.
Says Humbert: "I'm not for retirement yet, but it could happen." Also mum about her age, she adds, "I never thought I'd stick around for 50 years."
There is someone even more senior than United's venerables, however. American Airlines's Juanita Carmichael is, by most reckonings, the most senior flight attendant in the world. She has been flying for the AMR Corp. unit since July 1944 and she still can be found, at age 73, working the aisle of the coach cabin on flights to Tokyo, Europe and Hawaii.
"We all look wide-eyed at these ages in the States," says Howell Green, who was No. 3 at British Airways when he retired last year. "You won't find anybody over the age of 63 in British aviation." In much of Europe, airlines require flight attendants to retire in their 50s.
In the United States, when members of today's female old guard began as air hostesses or "stewardesses," they had to agree to retire at age 32, or even before if they married or had children. (Men, who have worked as cabin boys, stewards and pursers since the 1920s, encountered no such regulations.) There were strict height and weight rules. The pay was low and the work grueling, so the average tenure for a woman was only 18 months, says Georgia Nielsen, historian of the Association of Flight Attendants union.
But with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the organization of flight-attendant unions and numerous lawsuits against airlines' discriminatory practices, those rules fell away. Career longevity became a reality in the 1970s and 1980s, says Nielsen, herself a working flight attendant with 35 years' tenure.
"As long as you pass the (periodic) emergency training, there's nothing they can do" to fire you, says United's Humbert. "There's no age limit now."
In a profession where duties are essentially the same for neophytes and veterans and where salaries top out after about 14 years of service at $45,000 to $60,000 a year, seniority counts for a lot. Longtime attendants get the available seats when traveling standby for pleasure. They don't have to be on the reserve list, to be called for work in case someone else is sick. In the monthly bidding for work schedules, veterans are more likely to get the destinations they want, the vacation times they want, even the position they want to work on the airplane.
"I bid trips that are only one overnight," says Donna Langston, a United veteran of 29 years, adding, "If you're 30 from the top, you can almost count on getting what you want."