Aer Lingus pilots still seem to do very well, good salary and very good pension I hear, although the cost of living in Dublin is, I believe, very high. From what I've heard, the likes of Air France, KLM and Lufthansa also have very good contracts. Unfortunately the rest are/have been going the wrong way for quite sometime, even where pay/pensions are still good, there are longer two crew sectors and shortened rest.
Quite a few comparisons with other professions have been made. First-hand, I can only speak for the train driving world:
£50-70k basic depending on company, best top line I've seen on a payslip was £9500 for four weeks' work (including a lot of overtime).
Defined benefit pension at most places.
Typically a 4 day, 35 hour week.
Some companies are still "Sundays outside", meaning that unless you want to, you never have to work a Sunday. This was standard during BR days, some companies have "purchased" Sunday working from their drivers.
Internal redeployment with parachute payments if you lose your medical, at some companies you keep your drivers salary in the new role.
Fully funded training during which you receive approx. 50% of qualified pay and enrolment on the pension scheme.
Free travel with your own company and others under the same parent company from your first day of employment, 75% off all UK walk-up tickets after 6 months, FIP card for discounted continental rail travel after 1 year.
Job security on franchised passenger work is not dependent on industry financial performance, if your employer goes bust the government will either nationalise it or give the franchise to someone else and you get TUPE'd over. Freight and open access is a bit more like the airlines though.
How do we achieve it? We have a strong union and we also have a standard industry-wide aptitude test which has a 90%-ish failure rate with only one resit ever allowed. You also have to be taken on by a train company in order to become a trainee, so the entire industry isn't awash with newly qualified people desperate for a job. If you turned up for an interview and offered to pay for your own training (which costs a similar amount to an integrated fATPL), you'd get laughed out the door by management.
It's all supply and demand, look what happened in the US to T&Cs once the 1500 hour rule was brought in, if you can cut off the supply of people desperate for a job, pay and conditions will improve.
I'm currently doing a PPL, originally the intention was that I'd look to go for modular training or a funded cadet scheme afterwards, ow I'm tempted to just keep the PPL. Even though things have been "good" from 2014 through to 2018-ish, there's still a lot of people who haven't got jobs despite spending huge sums on training.