Pockets banned for airport staff

Kathmandu's Tribhuvan airport has banned pants with pockets for employees. Authorities hope it will help prevent bribes. From BBC News:

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) said it had sent a team to the airport to "observe the growing complaints about the behaviour of airport authorities and workers towards travellers".

"We discovered that the reports were true," spokesman Ishwori Prasad Paudyal told the AFP news agency.

"So we decided that airport officials should be given trousers with no pockets."

Nepal bans airline staff pockets (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Teller

Yeah, what about bras? Get rid of ‘em.
Anonymous

a few more years and all we’re going to be allowed to wear in airports are translucent paper mumus and crocks. For the security, of course.
Baldhead

I say all airport staff and all travellers do so NUDE.

nothing concealed now eh?
lumpi

I’m feeling save already.
Gilbert Wham

#8: Mandated pantslessness for the TSA and their brethren round the world? Sold.
Anonymous

They never needed pockets on Star Trek, I can’t see why this should be a problem.
Purly

Wait, people actually bribe the TSA?
Anonymous

Helloooooo Fannypacks!!!
Itsumishi

Wait everyone’s missing the point here!

We could all learn from this.

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) said it had sent a team to the airport to “observe the growing complaints about the behaviour of airport authorities and workers towards travellers”.

An authority with power over airline workers, listening to complaints about the behaviour of airport authorities and workers towards travellers.

I sure as hell think that’s a pretty amazing feat!
xstek99

We shouldn’t allow securities traders in the US to have offshore bank accounts either…
jetfx

That’s a kind of indirect solution to the problem…
nanuq

Works for me.
Anonymous

We need this for airports in the US, but not for preventing bribes: for preventing TSA employees from picking what they like from peoples’ luggage and taking it home. This kind of regulation would be natural, since we already don’t trust travelers the privacy of their pockets. Why trust the TSA goons?
Anonymous

Coleman Young tried the same thing in Detroit, with santitation workers. Didn’t work.
simonbarsinister

So let me get this straight…

They think that staff who think nothing of taking illegal bribes will hesitate to wear a money belt or pouch because that is against the rules?
nck wntrhltr

Cash still fits in their TSA-approved g-strings.
Anonymous

when waistbands are outlawed, only outlaws will have waistbands.
Antinous / Moderator

When I flew out of Kathmandu in ’87, there was a small curtained booth everyone went through one at a time. I thought it was a metal detector. Instead, inside was a guy sitting on a folding chair with a submachine gun across his lap.

I flew out in 1990. After I checked my bags, someone came over to me and told me that my bag was buzzing. I opened it up and found that I had left a battery in something. No, not that kind of something. I took it out and no harm done. The airport’s so small that they immediately knew that it was my bag without asking. No hysteria. And this was during a major Maoist uprising.
Anonymous

Why not rule out pants altogether? Seriously, this is all getting so ridiculous.
Mister Moofoo

Am I naive in thinking that they oughtta try just firing people who take bribes?
Anonymous

It used to be that employees for McDonalds didn’t have pockets in their uniforms either, and it was rumored to be the solution to till-dipping. But I noticed recently that this is not the case anymore. So either it wasn’t as good a solution as they thought it was, or they found an even better one.
subhan

I think all the workers should be required to work naked, with a wax seal on all bodily orifices. That’ll teach ‘em to take bribes!
Anonymous

The guy who designed that solution took a bribe from the pocketless trouser lobbying group.
mdh

Where will they keep the keys to the planes?
Ted8305

Yet apparently, shirts with pockets are still OK.
Adam Stanhope

Does anyone know if they still jail people for smuggling in gold to Nepal? Artificially maintaining an officially higher price for gold within the country always struck me as such a strange practice…
Anonymous

When I flew out of Kathmandu in ’87, there was a small curtained booth everyone went through one at a time. I thought it was a metal detector. Instead, inside was a guy sitting on a folding chair with a submachine gun across his lap. He asked me if I had any weapons. I said no, and he let me out the other side.

Don’t remember any pockets.
Anonymous

Local entrepreneur invents shirts with inner pockets for sleeves in 3..2..1..
Victor Bogado

Will they forbid underwear too?
RevEng

*Sigh* Once again, airlines demonstrate their lack of understanding of security issues.

As with all of their other security measures, this amounts to treating the symptoms instead of the disease. There are a hundred other ways they could take bribes — denying them pockets won’t stop them. How about investigating, firing, and charging people who take bribes? This isn’t something new — police have been dealing with these situations for hundreds of years. You don’t have to make it impossible, you just have to have a sufficient deterrent, and since you can never prevent it entirely, catch and stop those who inevitably do it anyway.

Unfortunately, I could sit here and scream until I’m blue in the face and no airline will ever hear me. Making logical arguments in the comments of a blog is little more than personal gratification.