KEY POINTS:
The $530-a-month base salary Crystal Zeng received as an Air New Zealand steward was "miserable", but what was worse for her were the working conditions.
"I remember feeling the pain when I see the others being able to go out to party while we don't even have enough money for movies and McDonald's," she told the Weekend Herald.
"Unlike the Kiwi crew who get cash allowances, what we get is tied to having meals at the hotel and a Chinese restaurant, and if we don't eat at a specific time, we have to go without food. We felt like prisoners in the hotel," said Ms Zeng, who quit the airline last July after nine months.
The only time they felt free to go out was when "kind people from the Kiwi crew ask us out and offer to pay for our drinks".
Other Chinese Air New Zealand flight attendants the Weekend Herald spoke to said they got a $55 daily allowance and the meals, but Ms Zeng said she couldn't remember getting that.
Ms Zeng, who first came to Auckland as an international student, applied for the airline job after graduating with a business diploma.
"No one told me that I wouldn't be working for Air NZ ... until my final interview when I had already been selected," she said. Instead she was employed by a Chinese company, Fasco, under Chinese terms.
Fed up with her pay and working conditions, she found a job as a bookkeeper. But when she returned to Shanghai to resign her airline job, she was told her work permit had been revoked and she could not return to New Zealand.
"I was completely shocked Air New Zealand, which says it is not even our employer, is able to get the work permit cancelled just like that," she said by phone from her home in Shenzhen.
Ms Zeng has engaged former immigration minister Tuariki Delamere to represent her in her fight to get her work permit reinstated.
The Department of Labour wouldn't comment on an individual case subject to court proceedings and Air New Zealand refused to comment on private employment matters.
