Cx management made the bet they could sh!t on their people and not pay the price. Obviously they made the wrong bet. Just like the wrong bet they made a few years ago with the fuel hedging debacle costing cx several billion dollars. Was that the moment of no return? Did they then decide that the only way to survive after that mega massive loss was to gut staff compensation with pilots being the ones with the biggest targets on the figurative compensation backs? Did the non-airline top managers of cathay not understand this staff group can't be easily or quickly replaced?
It's business 101 that in order to gain or hold brand loyalty, you must first have staff loyalty. Cathay has zero staff loyalty. Not just among pilots, but among all others. They can't get anyone to want to work for cathay despite over a year of active recruiting efforts. The only ones who are staying for now are the desparates who don't have any other options out there. How much staff loyalty do you think they have? After leaving cathay I'm now working at an airline that Dwarfs the size of what cathay once was. The quality of pilots we had at Cathay was so much higher it's not even comparable. It's a mild sh!t show in comparison. Lots of ex-cathay pilots where I am now and others around who had no intention of leaving cathay until... . Experience and skill levels previously routinely present on cathay flight decks is never going to be replaced by hiring questionable pilots or cadets. A percentage of those who will end up staying due to not having other choices will have the previous levels but that will only be a small percentage.
For those who claim cx can just hire locals to replace the expats they have lost and are still losing, don't leave out the fact that even if they hired all 2000+ pilots they currently lack locally today, these would need to spend the next couple of years in training before they qualify as only second officers to fill a seat only at cruise. Then another couple of years and more training to become junior first officers, etc. To replace an experienced first officer with a locally hired cadet it would take many years. To replace a captain, many many years. What happens to cathay's market share during this time? That market share has been on open sale for some time now. Foreign carriers have been offered deep discounts on landing fees by hk government. Let's remember cx market share now includes that of cathay dragon. To gain previous number of pilots and other staff to re-establish the previous market share, they have to hire those numbers too. So it's not just the 2000 pilots needed to re-staff cathay's pilot ranks, it's the full number of pilots cathay dragon had to operate that part of the market share too.
Capitalism without a leash around it's neck. Anything goes for business in the name of profits. A company can do whatever it likes to it's employees in hk. There's no concept of wrongful termination in hk labor law as we were told by HKAOA lawyers.
There's a very fitting expression that says "give any one species too much rope and they'll fukk it up". Cathay had no limit on how much rope when it came to what they could do with their employees and the result is what we have now. They can't even attract enough people let alone being picky about who they hire. Selection process? What selection process? They can't even get their hands on enough applications to staff the airline past 50% in all departments if they hired every single applicant.
Cathay is up a nasty sh!t creek of it's own making and its well deserved.
But HK in general is up a sh!t creek of it's own making also for the same reasons and its also well deserved. No accountibility of decision makers. Did they really think doing crazy for a couple of years would mean anything but disaster for the economy for a very long time? If not permanently clipping hk economy. No accountability and all the rope they wanted. Result is always the same.