Cathay Pacific fires staff over clip about non-English speakers

Controversy arises as the Hong Kong airline tries to recover from years of losses due to protests and COVID curbs.

Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong’s flagship airline, has fired three flight attendants who drew the ire of China’s state media after accusing them of discriminating against non-English speakers.

Cathay Pacific Chief Executive Ronald Lam said the employees were fired following an internal investigation into a passenger complaint on a flight between the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu and Hong Kong on Sunday.

In a post online, a person who identified as a passenger said flight attendants had been complaining among themselves about passengers and mocking customers asking for a carpet instead of a blanket in English.

“If you can’t say blanket in English, you can’t have it… There’s carpet on the floor. Feel free to lie about it,” someone could be heard saying in a recording widely circulated online.

Al Jazeera was unable to verify the authenticity of the clip, sparking outrage on social media.

“I would like to reiterate that Cathay Pacific takes a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to serious violations of company rules and ethics by individual employees and will not tolerate them,” Lam said in a statement Tuesday night.

On Tuesday, a Weibo account of the foreign edition of China’s official newspaper People’s Daily condemned Cathay over the incident.

“It seems that the corporate culture still maintains a sense of superiority that worships foreigners and respects Hong Kongers, but looks down on the mainlanders,” it wrote.

Cathay Pacific previously came under fire from Chinese state media when some of its employees expressed support for anti-government protests that rocked the former British colony in 2019.

Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee said on Wednesday that the incident was serious and should not be repeated.

“The flight attendants’ words and actions hurt the feelings of compatriots in Hong Kong and the mainland and destroy Hong Kong’s traditional culture and values ​​of respect and courtesy,” Lee said.

Cathay is trying to recover from years of losses from the protests and some of the world’s severe pandemic restrictions.

The airline reported a loss of 6.55 billion Hong Kong dollars ($834.4 million) for 2022 – nearly 20 percent more than in 2021, when the city was isolated from the world by COVID-related border controls.