However following your logic they should be paid at least 500 times better.
I am not quite sure how you manage to get that interpretation out of what I have written...
What I believe I was trying to say was that the groups of workers I mentioned are all comparable as they are
safety critical employees, of that group the only ones who are regularly expected to fund their own training are the pilots.
People have a passion for flying, at least I know I do. Airlines know this and are willing to make (ab)use of this fact. They know there are people like me out there who would sell their granny to fly. What they don't reckon on is people like my wife who keep reminding me of the realities of being able to pay the mortgage and feed the kids.
The financial equation of becoming a self sponsored airline pilot does not make sense, even without paying for a type rating. There is no handsome return on investment - in a business sense - for the financial input. If you want that, put the money into a building society account or get a good investment agent and you will safely return 7-10% per annum and you still have your investment capital. That makes financial sense.
Without type rated pilots airlines would own some very expensive kerosine burning garden sheds. Self sponsored pilots have taken the initiative and risk on initial training. They have taken the burden of the first phase. That burden is a large one.
If airlines feel that the employees should also shoulder the burden of the type specific training then apply that rule to all departments in the airline. I think you would find many people leaving the IT department/accounting/HR/middle management if they were asked to pay for the training costs of their specialist knowledge.
Aviation is a weird and wacky world full of weird and wacky people, there are too many intangibles in this business, flying on silvery wings touching the face of God and all, that make it worth the heartache and misery of getting "over the wall". It just seems that the wall gets a wee bit higher every time the industry hits rough spell. T & C get eroded a bit more, productivity demands get higher. You just need to compare the productivity of a lo-co first officer today with that of say a first officer with BEA back in the early 1970s to see the difference.
As a quick aside, the RBMK reactor design used at Chernobyl was never considered a "safe" one by Western experts. The combination of design flaws inherent in the RBMK, piss poor training of the operators and woeful communications between different groups and shifts at the plant led to the disaster.