Alright guys, let's get real here!
We all have a right to feed ourselves and our families. We all have a right to a financially sustainable job with a carrier that provides for more than five years worth of employment. Compass I, II, Horizon and even Ansett are examples of what can go wrong if it is not done right.
As pilots, we don't have the right to leave a wake of rubble behind us as we shoot the entire industry in the foot to get ahead of the next guy. Unfortunately, the guys at Impulse that paid for a job to fly a weed-whacker with wings on it, did just that!
Now I see that Qantas wants to do "outside" recruitment for it's new LCC. I think that anyone who has observed the industry, understands that they are engaging in an industrial experiment to see just how low pilots will go to get a job.
Such behavior, if tolerated by the industry at large, further degrades the potential for a financially viable future at the end of a long road of a burdensome gamble, by those that are coming up.
As you see the economics at play here, eventually you will see lower experience levels in the cockpit and lower "smarts" on the players that occupy those same places. Ask me how I know?
As Australians, you stand at a crossroads in the way that you view yourselves as pilots and as the general public will view you for perhaps the rest of time.
The independent employment contracts I have heard of sound like little more than indentured servitude and should be challenged by a large scale national union drive. You should strive to have your type training costs recovered as part of a future collective bargaining agreement.
A national union means just that. If you all go out, nobody goes back, including QF mainline/international. Anyone who scabs should be nationally blacklisted and left to spend their dying days flying a Cessna 206 in Kununurra.
To
VB Captn. I think you did the best you could with the conditions that you have found yourself in. You simply had nothing left to do, and it's understandable that you would work for tricky. I am sure you would have been even happier to do so, if there had been a unionised contract that prohibited you from parting with money you probably didn't even own.
To the guys that went to Impulse, and paid that money to jump on a Beechcraft and work for a financially unsustainable employer?
They got very lucky, they gambled and won for themselves, but in the process lost a traditional benefit of working for an airline for everyone else...not having to pay for training.
National unions, national contracts, scab lists and legal representaion that works. This can only be done with an effective nationally recognised union!
Now do I have to come back there?