Fiona, as others have said, your contribution was heartbreaking in its simplicity, and exposing the salary paid to a relatively experienced pilot will raise questions, but in the end nothing will change. Why? I think everybody reading this thread knows the answer. Read on for what it's worth.
Uncommon Sense,
This is where we part company. Your arguments belong to an ideal world, and it is my view that anybody who thinks those ideals can ever apply to GA pilots is deluding himself.
I'm not a pilot, but I've been around the periphery of the GA scene a long time, certainly long enough to know the good operators from the bad.
GA companies have one thing in common. They almost all struggle to make a buck. They all look for ways to improve that situation, and there are lots of ways to do it. Increasing income is difficult, so all the possibilities involve reducing expenditure. Reading through this forum alone will give you some idea of how that expenditure is reduced, but number one on the list will always be pilots' wages.
Not for the first time on this forum, I'm going to return to the principle of supply and demand, because it is the inherent problem. There are so many young people with stars in their eyes with a vision to be airline pilots, and so few positions available, that it doesn't take an economics degree to forecast the result.
If you look back over this forum, you will see hundreds of threads on this subject. The young hopefuls post, "how do I get hours?"
Those two rungs up the ladder say "piss off, you aren't going to undercut me".
Those at the top of the ladder, the airline pilots, all say "Thou shalt not work for less than a reasonable wage, and thou shalt never fly parachutists for nothing just to accumulate hours, and thou shouldst always think of thy fellow aviators, though verily we made it to where we are by doing exactly what thou doest now".
I can only repeat; the law of supply and demand rules everything. As long as there are kids (of whatever age) who are prepared to break rules to achieve that impossible dream, the status quo will remain. The flying dream will always overcome logical thought, and it's quite certain that industrial action will never work. Why? Because anybody with an unquenchable dream will do anything to achieve that dream; and if that involves stabbing others in the back, metaphorically of course, that is what will happen.
My usefulness is limited, but I hope, though I can't be sure, that I had some part in dissuading a pilot of my acquaintance from joining Cathay during their industrial action. Said pilot now flies for Virgin and loves it.
While this is a different subject, it belongs in the same general field. When your eyes are fixed on a distant dream, it's bloody hard for anybody to divert those eyes.