Captin Prop, I agree with you. In order to lower costs by opening up SAS Ireland and LHR base SAS needed to keep the terms and conditions significantly lower than any competitor in UK. Ryanair permenant contracts (which are now offered to almost all the pilots) are miles better than SAS Ireland/CAE. The same goes for starting with SAS in Scandinavia. Apart from the other problems Ryanair pilots are facing in regards to their employer, pay, pension and roster is a lot better in Ryanair than SAS (both main and LHR/AGP).
The same goes for Norwegian right now, especially in the Nordic countries where they just hired quite a lot of pilots.
So SAS will be looking to hire pilots from the regional airlines (luckily for them, Nextjet just went belly up so there are some 80 pilots there, although quite a few of them has already been scooped up by the likes of Flybe, Cityjet, BRA etc.) or the still shady outfits with bogus self-employment and these pilots see that a career at SAS is not what it was 15 years ago, there are better options out there. Easy are hiring 900 pilots this year I read and the SAS main contract is substantially lower than Easy.
Although SAS claim to have 3000 applications in their datebase, I would think that 9 out of 10 of those are not interested in joining when they understand what the pay is and how and how much an SAS pilot actually works these days.
A quick comparison: Two pilots (both rated with 1500 hours) start at SAS ARN and Norweigan ARN respectively. After 20 years of service and 10 years to command the Norwegian pilot will have earned more than 20% better than the SAS pilot and the company contributed pension will be worth about 45% more than of the SAS pilot. The same story goes for most other airlines too unless you look at the likes of Primera, Air Baltic, Nordica (Regional Jet), Smartlynx etc.