Well, truth be told, I never really complained about the low wages, promised bonuses that were withheld and sensible cost cutting measures, since I wanted my company to do well. Working for an uncompetitive company does not hold much security for an employee with a family to support.
The real objections and concern arose from the management style which was incompetent at best, criminally negligent at worst.
To explain better, I will recount a period of time in the history of our ops dept where we had no manager or even duty controller in charge. In one of the many re-shuffles in the company just prior to being sold off, we were supposed to be under the supervision of the check-in duty controllers of both T2 and T3, yet because of squabbling between these two groups, we just got ignored. This left us to govern ourselves for 6 months. In that time period, we had the lowest sick leave, the slickest leave coverage, the least amount of delays, the least amount of errors and the best team work I had ever seen, since we knew we were onto a good thing. The sense of group-responsibility and subsequent support within the team made it truly enjoyable to go to work.
When one of the notoriously incompetent managers was yet again shuffled out of the sh!te that he created in another department, our 'hole' was identified as a harmless place to stick him, and thus began our decline again. He saw his first task as establishing discipline by punishing nearly the whole department for various cr@p, a la Capt soble (Band of Bros). In a matter of weeks he had us turning against each other in order to "get the wind out of our sails" (his words).
This isn't about the low wages or lack of prestige of our jobs. This is about sh!tty management justifying their jobs, cr@pping on those below for personal gain and making themselves out to be better than they are by purging their departments of anyone they percieve as better than them. Nothing new, since it seems to be happing at the highest levels of government all the way down to line management of most companies in this country.
On a side note, I began posting here a few weeks ago, mainly banging the same drum and expecting to get flamed to hell. So it is pleasantly surprising that my posts have been treated with much more respect and sensitivity than I ever expected. I'd just like to say thank you for not jumping to the conclusion that I am just another disgruntled ex-employee. While I have little respect for those running the industry right now, it is my love of aviation and deep concern for its future that motivates me. That and the chance that some may learn from what I have seen and experienced.
The problem here is not declining wages, but the erosion of standards through utterly dire management and an almost total lack of oversight that is allowing regulations to be routinely ignored. What you see in the posts above are the symptoms not the roots of the problem itself. What the industry desperately needs are trained managers that put their workforce above their promotion, who will stick up for their department and the regulations and standards they were untrusted to uphold and have the guts to say enough when the bean counters are asking for the impossible. What we've got are yes-men with less integrity than thives who would sell their staff to the devil in order to get that pat on the back.
If we started now by intensive training and regulations that demanded proven qualifications, I reckon it would take 5 years before a new generation of competent managers would start to turn the corner in this country. The snowball is gathering pace and heading downhill all the way. In the meantime, we get David Brent to make us all laugh at the irony.