On the web, out of a job

The tale of a fired flight attendant illustrates how the content of a personal blog can lead to serious consequences.

The New York Times and The Times of London detail how Delta Air Lines fired Ellen Simonetti after she posted mildly provocative photos of herself on her blog, Diary of a Flight Attendant. (She has since added “Fired” to the title.) The photos showed Simonetti in her Delta uniform inside an airliner cabin.

Delta isn’t talking, but Simonetti told the New York Times that her supervisor said she was being terminated for "inappropriate photos in a Delta uniform." Simonetti filed a sex-discrimination complaint against Delta with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is threatening to sue Delta for $10 million, claiming male employees aren’t fired for similar behavior, the Times reports.

Simonetti shouldn’t expect a remedy from employment or privacy law, said J. H. Verkerke, professor of law and director of the Program for Employment and Labor Law Studies at the University of Virginia. "Nonunion employees enjoy very little legal protection for their off-duty activities," Verkerke told the Times. He added that Simonetti gave up privacy claims by posting the photos on the Web.

Airlines are changing their corporate cultures in response to the earlier era of overt sexualization of flight attendants, Verkerke and an author of a career guide for flight attendants told the Times.

Simonetti, for her part, said she would have removed the photos or stopped blogging entirely if Delta had asked her to. ''I feel like if they had a problem with it they should have said something to me,'' she told the Times.