Two United Airlines female flight attendants have filed a lawsuit against the carrier, saying United chooses young, mostly blond crews for working the best routes, including charters for sports teams.
The plaintiffs - a black woman with 28 years experience and a Jewish woman with 34 years with the airline - allege that United makes the assignments based "entirely on their racial and physical attributes, and stereotypical notions of sexual allure," according to a review of the lawsuit by Bloomberg News Service.
Both women say they tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get assigned to work the charter flights.
United has contracts to provide air travel for about three dozen teams in the National Football League, Major League Baseball and National Collegiate Athletic Association, according to the lawsuit.
Attendants who work those flights earn more and are provided with premium accommodations. They also sometimes get tickets to games, including playoff and Super Bowl tickets, and "extremely valuable" infield passes, also according to Bloomberg.
The flight attendants, Sharon Tesler and Kim Guillory, said they were told by supervisors that they were unable to get work on the charters because they weren't on "preferred" lists. More damning is that the lists were allegedly based on team preferences, according to the complaint. They said they later discovered that young, white, blond attendants - with less seniority - were given the assignments.
"United has created a despicable situation," the women said in the lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in San Mateo, Calif. ("It's) as if decades of laws and policies preventing discrimination based on age, race and ancestry, and gender simply do not exist."
United Airlines didn't respond to a request for comment.
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