This brings new meaning to “airstrip”.
A naked flight attendant might seem like an OnlyFans fantasy. However, that’s not the case for some air hostesses, who have turned to shedding their clothes for cash and other desperate measures to make ends meet when they’re not working in the financially unfriendly skies.
“I’m definitely not a girl you’d normally see in a strip club,” one flight attendant, Bree, told NewsNation about her unlikely side hustle. “I grew up with a lot of morals, with a lot of Christian morals. I have a partner, I have a job.”
However, after a long shift in the sky, the air hostess takes off her wedding ring and flight attendant uniform and prepares to start her gig at a strip club.
Unfortunately, this profession exposed Brain to an unpleasant environment filled with pimps, drug dealers and strange customers.
“I’ve never had people ask me for a blow job and they’d pay $500,” said the stripper flight attendant, who chose to remain anonymous for fear of losing her flight attendant job, as she described the change from her previous gig. . “I would never be asked all the time if I could go home and have sex with someone for money. I didn’t grow up that way.”
Of particular concern is fentanyl, which is so prevalent among Bree’s clientele that she has come to recognize its distinctive “peanut butter” scent, NewsNation reported.
She also carries Narcan with her in case of an overdose from exposure — which can affect those who don’t even use the drug.
Bree said her second job was born out of a “need to survive”.
While flight attendants may seem like they make a lot of money, in reality they are “poor” and earn under “$30,000 a year” in their first year, the crew member said. For reference, Bree collects between $300 and $1,000 for a strip night, enough to cover rent and more.
One problem is that many airlines, including United Airlines, do not pay crew members for much of the time they are on duty, including waiting at the gate, or when passengers are boarding or disembarking, NewsNation reported.
One flight attendant, surnamed Kim, claimed she is only compensated for half the hours she works.
“You train for six weeks and you don’t get paid for any of it,” lamented the mother of three, who works for a major airline. “Sometimes, you work 10 1/2 hour days and get paid five.”
Kim added: “In all reality, I’m paid less than a McDonald’s worker.”
Flight attendant Nasstasja Lewis claimed her top airline salary was $250, enough for an unpaid bill and a trip to the grocery store for her and her son.
Left with no choice, the cash-strapped crew member resorted to eating passengers’ scraps to get her through until the next payday. In the past, flight attendants have even stolen food from the first class snack basket.
“You have to put your pride aside and say, ‘Hey, I have to eat, or I don’t,'” Lewis said. “It makes you feel a certain way during those times, because you’re like, ‘What am I doing here?’
Thresia Raynor, a 17-year veteran with Alaska Airlines, was surprised at how many of her colleagues were homeless.
She told News Nation, “Every day at my job, I have to drop off a girl who doesn’t have a car and transport to a homeless place, or take her to a car where she lives, or often share meals with her. . that at work because there is no food and no money for food.”
Even the mental scale is alarming. A 2012 study found that the suicide rate among flight attendants is over one and a half times higher than the general population.
“Not a week goes by that I don’t hear another heartbreaking story from a flight attendant, and it’s from every base,” said Ken Diaz, president of the Union of Flight Attendants Association-CWA – the nation’s largest
He called this airplane poverty with wages not keeping pace with inflation, explaining: “No one has ever experienced the cost of living like today. And when you put that wage rate into today’s cost of living, it’s nothing. They cannot survive.”
Liam Horgan, a first-year flight attendant with United Airlines who lives with 20 other crew members in the Bay Area, said his bosses even instructed him on how to apply for food stamps.
“I just feel it’s kind of shameful that corporate greed has gotten to the point where management at these corporations are saying to new hires, ‘Hey, we know we’re not paying you a living wage, so here’s how we can to apply for welfare,” he said.
United Airlines recently pledged to compensate their crew members fairly in line with time.
“We are eager to reach the industry-leading settlement with our flight attendants that they deserve,” airline representatives said in a statement, via NewsNation. We will meet with them the last week of October and again in November under the federal mediation process requested by the union. Both sides are actively engaged in these negotiations.”
In the meantime, as with Bree and others, flight attendants may need to get creative to stay on top.
Some previous side gigs ranged from drug smuggling to – perhaps surprisingly given the times – social media channels in which they offer travel lessons and details of life working in the often unfriendly skies.
In perhaps the most flawed form of moonlighting, an American Airlines flight attendant earns extra dough selling courses on how flight attendants can make money selling photos of their feet online.
“I use a completely separate account from my main Instagram and just post a ton of pictures of my feet,” she explained in one of her TikTok tutorials. “You have to actually look at the pictures of the feet and the pictures of the feet. Each one has a specific name for what the pose is, and people have different fetishes for each type of pose.”
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Image Source : nypost.com