Actuator, the point of my post was that there is a very acrimonious relationship between pilots and management. Why is this news to you???
There are a lot of managers out there who do an excellent days work and get really tired of hearing how incompetent they are from the pilots. Hence the level of respect for pilots from management is non existent. There seems to be 2 sets of rules in this airline- one for the pilots and one for the rest of the company.
Frankly I don’t give a stuff what you earn and if you are worth it or not. The question I ask myself is if you had to start an airline in South Africa from scratch- would I pay pilots/cabin crew/ call centre staff/ management the same salaries as what SAA pays? HELL NO!!
A very nice example here is Mango- look at the pilots- they pay a market related salary- in comparison to the other South African operators (with the exception of SAA) and no shortage of applicants to fill the seats- they don’t even have a pension plan. 400 cv's in the pile- lots of jet drivers in there too. Now if Mango was to go long haul Im sure we could convince some of the crew to move up to a 330 or something similar and I bet we wont have to pay them double to do it either. All the while Emirates and Cathay are paying much more money and yes you will loose crew to them every year, unfortunately that is the reality- the question is how many. Do you go and pay everyone double just to try and stop a few leaving every year? Definitely not. I have no doubt that the South African market can supply suitably qualified pilots well into the future- even with the ones going overseas. Its all about supply and demand.