Jordyn Antonio-Rooney argued it was a mistake for which she felt a lot of shame before she was sacked for getting herself and her aunt airside, and onto the plane.
An airline senior manager believed she had used her position to get around the normal departure process because the Customs hall was busy, and she and her aunt were running late.
The former flight attendant who had recently moved into a crew support role committed nine security breaches including that she took a member of the public into an unauthorised area of Auckland International Airport, which amounted to serious misconduct.
She has now failed to prove her dismissal was unjustified.
The Employment Relations Authority has found that dismissal was an option that Air New Zealand could have reached as a fair and reasonable employer.
In the recent decision, ERA member Eleanor Robinson found that Antonio-Rooney’s actions were “not an isolated act of negligence”, but the breaches were repeated and sustained.
“Moreover they were committed in full knowledge of the importance of the security requirements.”
In June last year, Antonio-Rooney was on her way from Auckland to Australia for a family celebration.
Only the month before she was employed in a crew support role, having been a flight attendant for the airline since 2017.
Her employment contract included a list of policies that included the code of conduct and instructions about airline security.
Antonio-Rooney was also bound by additional requirements because she worked in a highly regulated environment, being an international airport.
She was also bound by laws governing civil aviation, which meant she was required to have strictly controlled security clearance cards, issued by the Civil Aviation Authority and Auckland Airport.
Antonio-Rooney and her aunt checked in and proceeded to the main Customs area.
She noticed a large queue so decided to detour to the crew room, and claimed it was to check if a passport for a crew member had arrived.
She told the ERA this was urgently required to undertake her duties in cabin crew enablement.
Antonio-Rooney said she told her aunt to accompany her through the secure access door.
Records showed that she used her airport security card to swipe through an access point down a corridor leading away from the international departures hall beside the area where passengers queued for passport control.
After passing through this first security access point Antonio-Rooney said she followed a pilot through the next door he had held open for her.
She said later that failure to swipe her card at that point was an oversight, and not deliberate.
She then entered the in flight service room, to check on the crew member’s passport, and left her aunt alone in the corridor outside.
Antonio-Rooney then swiped through another door, bypassing the Customs area desks, and allowed her aunt to “tailgate” her through the door. She believed the door would lead her back to the Customs line, but it did not.
A senior manager in her department and witness for the respondent, Douglas Grant, told the ERA that the door had a glass window. He said it would have been clear to the two women walking along that corridor that they would have bypassed Customs passport control and ended up right at the front of the security screening queue.
She said she had mistakenly come through the wrong door and was asking how to return to the Customs line.
When she saw the airport manager walking towards her, Antonio-Rooney clarified that she was a staff member travelling on a staff pass and had no intention of bypassing Customs. She explained that her aunt was travelling with her and they had mistakenly gone through the wrong door.
They returned to the Customs queue and boarded the flight to Australia.
The incident was reported by some of the airport staff with whom Antonio-Rooney had met along the way, including aviation security staff who had confiscated Antonio-Rooney’s airport security card.
She was soon in talks about a proposal to suspend her on full pay while an investigation was carried out. It was followed by a disciplinary process, leading to her dismissal.
Antonio-Rooney said it was a “one-off mistake” and could not be categorised as behaviour that deeply impaired the trust between employer and employee.
Grant said he had considered a lesser outcome than dismissal, but he did not accept that what had occurred was accidental, because of the numerous breaches.
He said that given her past and current work experience, she should have had a greater awareness of the rules, yet she chose to break them.
The ERA said dismissal was always a harsh outcome of a disciplinary process but Antonio-Rooney had been in a privileged position in which she was trusted with access to secure parts of Auckland International Airport, and on the morning of June 23 last year she had repeatedly breached security protocols and rules.
The New Zealand Customs Service and the Auckland Airport company were conducting their own investigations.
Air New Zealand told NZME it did not comment on individual employment matters.
Efforts have been made via social media to reach Antonio-Rooney.
By Tracy Neal
Open Justice multimedia journalist
