flight attendants have to make it through months of safety and first aid training in order to be hired by any major airline meet fairly strict grooming and uniform standards and show up well before a flight takes off

to help get passengers situated for a workday that may run to 12 hours from start to finish.

For all that, those at the start of their careers might earn about the same as the folks who work

in the fast food places at the airport. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

I'll go on record to say I think fast food workers deserve a decent living wage for full-time work.

I mean them no disrespect. But I was really surprised when I read a recent article about the

hardships faced by flight attendants for the first several years of their careers, if they can

hold out that long. The job of flight attendants might seem glamorous given the travel benefits,

but as my guest learned, some people in these careers struggle to afford a roof over their heads

or even decent meals when they are home. Natalie B. Compton is a travel reporter for The Washington Post,

which published her article, barely surviving. Some flight attendants are facing homelessness

and hunger. Natalie, welcome to think. Thank you so much for having me. It's possible, of course,

to fall into an occupation because a certain job is open at the time we need a job and the rest is

history, like retail sales or food service. But being a flight attendant seems like a pretty

deliberate choice for most people, right, given the training involved? Absolutely. People go

into this profession for many reasons. Most see it as a long-term life career, a dream job for many people

that comes with, like you said, those travel benefits. They expect to have this glamorous lifestyle.

And because it is a very difficult career to get into, it takes applying to even be considered,

then you need to make it through a

very strict training. So nobody really ends up here by accident. It is a very deliberate years-long

process for many people to even start. What did people tell you about why they wanted to do this

for a living? So I interviewed 18 current and former flight attendants for this story, and a common thread

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