After American Airlines introduced a new uniform for its flight attendants in September of 2016, multiple attendants began to suffer from mysterious illnesses: violent nausea, respiratory distress, and skin sensitivities As it turns out, the company providing the uniforms had added formaldehyde, which had in turn seemed to make these attendants sick. Now, four attendants have been awarded $1 million as a result of a drawn out court case in California, the Washington Post reports.
Formaldehyde is actually a fairly common inclusion in clothing, as it helps to prevent wrinkles. In the case of the AA flight attendants, however, the formaldehyde in their cotton blouses resulted in a series of illnesses that, in many cases, prevented the attendants from working.
From the story:
Tracey Silver-Charan didn’t suspect her new uniform was at fault when she began feeling “violently sick” at work in 2016. A flight attendant for 37 years, she had been through several uniform changes by the time American Airlines introduced new workwear for all its employees in September of that year. But soon she notified her supervisors she was suffering persistent health problems on the job. Whenever she came home from a trip, she’d start to feel better.
“I was having severe respiratory distress,” Silver-Charan, a 61-year-old based in Los Angeles, told The Washington Post. “I couldn’t even breathe. And my voice would go hoarse. I would feel like I was going to faint. I got some rashes.”
Other attendants noted chronic bronchitis, swollen eyes, lung damage, and more as a result of the Twin Hill-made blouses.
This isn’t the first time Twin Hill has been at the wrong end of a lawsuit, either; back in 2013, Alaska Airlines flight attendants filed a similar suit after their new uniforms seemed to cause rashes, hives, and other skin problems. In that case, Twin Hill won the suit.
In the more modern case, however, over $1 million was awarded to four flight attendants who raised concerns — but this won’t be the last we hear of this suit. In 2017, 425 employees filed the suit, and lawyers are tackling them one case at a time.