Virgin shouldn't have to reward sickness incentives, maybe to a small amount when the problem is small, but when a quarter of you are not turning up, it needs to get strict. Personally I believe, the problem grows exponentially, a few people go sick for a busy vegas, then others don't want to do a vegas, because it goes crew down, so they go sick. Then all vegas's become one to go sick for and the problem gets worse and worse.
The company tries to get round this by giving more standby, to allow you the cover, yet you don't want to do standby. Standby is there purely to cover for sickness, or crew out of hours due tech or whatever reasons. In theory if everyone goes to work, standby wouldn't be needed. Your gripe is, standby has increased, this will be purely due to sickness increasing.
And as an aside, if you knew anything about engineering, there is no big drive for unionisation, because funny enough, we're pretty happy where we are. We have a staff committee that meet with management to discuss things we have minor problems with and these get rectified over time. Of course we'd all like a bit more pay, but funny enough, those that want more money, go out, get more qualifications, get more experience, and jump up the payscale - as you would if you wanted more money in any job. We all got 2%, more would have been nice, but then again, at least we got more money, and we're still employed, so for a year in aviation, thats pretty good. What we don't do is ask for something for nothing. Thats what you've done, they offered you 4.8%, but you'd have to work a bit more - you turned it down. Now you have nothing.
Well done.