Windytoo - I think the Virgin crews would be surprised to hear that all other airlines cut costs to compete with the lo-cos. I seem to remember them getting a rather large payrise, helped in no small part by benchmarking themselves against BA. Your outlook on the future of your career seems particularly bleak if you believe you are powerless to resist cost cutting and hence slashing of your T&Cs. We prefer to influence our futures.
On the subject of us all being theoretically equal, well yes we are. In reality we know thats not the case or we'd all get the same results in our sim checks. The reality is there's a big spread, good and bad. BA have said their selection criteria will be different for Lauren to mainline. Different technical ability, different psychological make up, different numerical ability. Does that sound to you like they are expecting to hire the good guys?