Some excellent responses there!
Aeroboero is right. Why should he in Brazil, earn less than his counterparts in North America or Western Europe? He's presumably gone through similar training and hour building as people here - yet a Brazilian pilot probably earns less in a year than a DL captain earns in a month, flying the same aircraft.
Whilst, as
Fly4fud says, at certain companies the pilots have tried to dictate to the market (rather than the other way round) this is a short term plan that generally ends up in tears. It wasn't that long ago that AA stood up to their pilots - and they backed down.
The reason that fares are so low is because of competition. There are a lot of seats chasing not all that many bums - and the only way the market can be stimulated to create higher demand (and thus more bums) is to reduce fares. This can only be done effectively if costs are also low - we've seen what happened when high cost carriers attempted to create low cost operations. The moment an airline increases its fares, demand falls away - this is basic economics.
High overhead + low yields = bankrupcy.
dallas dude - there are an awful lot of other professions where people have to go through similar amounts of training and low pay. A doctor/surgeon would be one such example - and the pay rates in the UK for NHS surgeons are certainly nothing to write home about! Accountants, lawyers, dentists, vets, scientists, professors ... really all the true 'professions' involve long periods of training/indenture and much sacrifice. What makes pilots any different?
As for your analogy of putting your life in other people's hands - what about train or bus drivers? Ships captains? Taxi drivers? A cruise liner captain has responsibility for considerably more people - and a much more valuable asset - than an A380 pilot ever will! On the ALPA formula of bigger + more pax = more pay, the captains of the new cruise leviathans should be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month!
As you say, the top of the crop in any profession can expect to earn more than their less able colleagues. Does this mean that you're saying that AA, DL, UA etc employ the best of the best - and that there are no second rate pilots in there? If so, that's incredibly naive - and arrogant. I have no doubt that there are many pilots around the world who are at least as good as the best at the US majors - in many cases, probably better; yet they get paid a lot less.
Of course, at the other end of the scale one has the sports players, actors and pop stars earning millions. And you've got merchant bankers (investment bankers for our US friends) and attorneys earning truly staggering sums of money - the value that they are putting into society and the economy can well be debated!
