Wow. Great posts! Have to say I'm one of those leaving because I'm fed up of the pissy salary and being messed around so often. An example of how well we are looked after : when night-stopping in another base, I turned up for work to find I was out of check on the a/c at that base. It shouldn't have been rostered, and the fantastic AIMS systems that everyone (apart from those who actually use it everyday) raves about hadn't flagged it as illegal.
Luckily there was someone else to do the first two sectors of the afternoon shift. The way around getting someone else in to do the last 4 was to get me to position to another destination, hop on a different aircraft that I could legally operate, and the guy on that one would swap with me.
One problem - all my stuff for 4 days worth of night-stopping was spread across my hotel room. When I mentioned this to crewing, the response was "that's not a concern of ours. If we have time we'll look into getting it back to your base for you".
How considerate. All my personal belongings (luckily I'd not taken all my 'toys' with me
had to be packed up by some hotel person, and another cabin crew member had to check it in as their own on a flight back to my home base....