I stand open to correction but a NHS GP doesnt look forward to 24 years of incruments that effectively double their pay
No but if takes a career path ending in Consultant or higher his/her salary dwarfs anything a pilot can earn.
It is a fallacy that because 'We get paid well because of the Union and the problems we can cause the company if we strike ". If that was true our engineers, who do deserve much higher pay, would be able to use the same tactic.
I admit we are a powerful negotiating group but at the the end of the day market forces are the most telling influence on pilot salaries.
I worked for a small scheduled carrier in the late '80s. BA started recruiting, people left the charter operators and people like myself left the turbo-prop operators. My salary went up 40% in 12 months in an effort to keep people from leaving! I still left and my company could not get or keep pilots, that was until the market changed and once again there became a surplus of pilots.
I work for BA and I get paid a good salary (for which we work a damn site harder than 10 years ago) but if anybody here thinks that what BA pay doesn't influence the rest of the industry then they are living in cloud cuckoo land.
As has been discussed ad nauseum it is now questionable whether the move to BA is worth it for someone working for one of the other decent companies in the UK. The situation will be reached where if BA cannot recruit sufficient people then they will have to improve the package and the whole roundabout starts turning again.