TACHO, an excellent post!
However, in answer to
Give me something that's unfair with seniority?
... I will repeat my earlier example:
"Pilot B is a junior pilot but is really keen on a base move, so he bids for it. It takes a year for a vacancy to come up and just before it does so Pilot A, who is an old timer in the company, decides to bid for that base. On the first-come-first-served system, Pilot B gets the base move. However, on a seniority system, Pilot A (who had absolutely no interest in that other base for all of the last year) can play his last-minute trump card of seniority and get that base that Pilot B had been longing for for the past year. Which one is fair?"
That situation actually existed. Pilot B was at a base 6 hrs drive from his family and really, really wanted to get back to his family, but where his family lived was a 'stable' base without a lot of movement, hence the long wait for a vacancy. Pilot A had shown no interest in that base whatsoever for all that period, but at the very last minute when it appeared a vacancy was going to be coming up said "Ooh, I'll have that" and put in a bid and got the base move purely based on seniority, leaving Pilot B with another long wait for his eventual base move.
I just do not understand the thinking of anyone who thinks that that was 'fair'.
And as for the "you knew the conditions when you joined" argument, does that mean that everything when you join is set in stone and should never change? Nothing should ever improve? Anyone here, go back and look at your original contract and apply that exactly to now, including pay etc. "You knew the conditions when you joined"! For most pilots they take the job because it is the one on offer and fine detail like "does it use seniority lists" is not an overriding factor.
All T's&C's have evolved with time and that is simply one aspect that can do so too.
And as for those who want to accuse non-seniority systems of having a 'military' element of "who's known who", well isn't the entire seniority system something that had it's origins in the military? I think that many, many years ago on something very similar here I quoted the only time that I can think of where seniority really did work out well and that was when Lt Chard took command at Rourke's Drift as his commission date was earlier than Lt Bromhead's. Aeroplanes weren't flying yet then.
It's an antiquated system and needs to be radically re-thought.