Fact: some crew are well-known to use sickness to engineer days off, a situation that has been the case since the days of BOAC.
Fact: flight crew sickness rate is approximately the same as that for office-based staff - cabin crew sickness would be expected to be the same as flight crew, but it is not.
Fact: there is nothing to prevent cabin crew with colds from office-based working.
Solution: Bidding (at a financial cost, but with motivational benefits), sickness monitoring - to ensure that employees are healthy and getting the required support and that shirkers are identified.
The reason that this irks cabin crew is that it compromises a beloved use of sick days to manipulate bidding, and remove undesirable trips. For many crew, it will have no effect, and indeed they will surely feel more supported that their employer is concerned about their wellbeing while ill.
Nobody is suggesting that if you are unfortunate enough to catch a lot of colds that people would be fired - one has to ask however why some groups are so highly concerned about how this might impact their lifestyle.
I would suggest that any reason of needing to be off more due to being operating crew to be bogus simply due to the flight crew comparison, coupled with many office workers often not working themselves when ill with colds as they are not particularly pleasant or conducive to concentration.
Nothing to fear from genuinely ill people I would say.
Last edited by Lucifer; 18th Jul 2005 at 16:45.