boofta
Some signigicant differences between Cathay and EK.
When Cathay introduced basings, everyone was on the A scale. That was back in the days when it was considered that you had to pay people a huge amount of money to live in HK. So they did. The trade off with basings was that you took a huge pay cut, but still earned a huge salary and got to live in your home country.
Many Cathay based people didn't have to pay tax in their country of domicile so in fact they laughing all the way to the bank.
EK on the other hand pay salaries that are well below industry standards and assume that we are all happy to accept them in order to live in "paradise". My salary converted to home country dollars is below that of a LoCo. If you then apply the tax factor, it is not an option. So EK would in fact have to increase basic salaries if they were to try and base people in countries with normal taxation rules. Some of my UK friends tell me that the after tax dollar at Easy or Ryanair is more than they are paid here!
BTW even after the turmoil at Cathay over the last decade, a Cathay F/O still earns more than an EK captain. And I would suggest that a Cathay Captain on a basing would still be earning significantly more, after tax, than and EK Captain in Dubai is earning.
So as you can see, it is not easy to compare the Cathay basings model to EK.
dmf