Originally Posted by
Sam Ting Wong
but in general Cathay has treated me well. I really can't blame them for my decision to join.
However much you may be enamored to your employer despite their constant attack on your CoS, your post and point of view is irrelevant here.
As a B scale, your contract is infinitely better than the one any new joiner will have to sign. Most importantly, you never had to worry about housing.
New joiners have a very different lifestyle to plan for. One that involves spending a not insignificant proportion of a salary scale that doesn't keep up with inflation into renting a space that would qualify as a walk-in closet elsewhere in the World. That's before considering housing a family with kids.
Education is getting more expensive as you said, yet the newer contract offers less compensation for tuition fees.
The only property ownership experience available is paying a 25 year, US$1 million mortgage for a 500 sq.ft. flat, if you've been thrifty enough to save up for the 40% deposit and stamp duty, and assuming you've been here more than 7 years continuously.
Hong Kong is not really getting any bigger, and as more people are coming in, the cost of life keeps increasing (way faster than the laughable official inflation rate), and quality of life keeps decreasing.
Life in HK on CoS18 will be a very far cry from what your experience has been, and will only get worse with time.
Then again, deterring the rosy-vision equipped wannabees is impossible. All they see is a big shiny jet. They tell themselves it'll be alright, that they'll commute to Phuket or that they'll go back home when they've had the P1 rating... Of course by then, years have passed and life has a way of making it hard to start over again somewhere else, and CX, along with every other airline, has taken advantage of another soul desperate to join the ranks at any cost to cheapen the profession.
On the whole, I agree with many. It's not just CX we're fighting against. They're just a greedy corporation doing what they do best: maximizing profit at the expense of their employees whenever they can get away with it (and aided by the very favorable local labor laws). As long as hordes of starry-eyed kids who still idolize the profession and lifestyle keep flocking in and signing any paper that's waved at them to get the chance to look through a windshield, things will just keep getting worse, regardless of how many of these threads warning them we post.
The profession as a whole is going down the drain. Airlines have found the solution to infinite and cheap workforce: hire anybody with a pulse. Those things fly themselves anyway, right?