Shockwave,
Its good to be the King, Lord of all you survey. With all due respect:
It is so frustrating to sit overseas and watch you guys fight against one another as to how much less you can work for. I can only guess at how it must feel to be a part of a self perpetuating decline in professional terms and conditions.
Then when you reach the limit of what you are prepared to swallow your companies turn around and say we can't get enough crew, lets import them from overseas!
So you lose again!
I don't think it is just a matter of education, we are all well aware of where we are and how we got here. Our motivation, goals and egos will always be prey to exploitation from our employers, and we generally accept it because there always seems to be another carrot dangled just in sight.
This doesn't affect me but from what I've read and heard around the traps, the Virgin people are concerned about the expats all coming home and working for a lot less than the going rate, just to get home. Where does that stand in your equation. I believe (open to correction on anything, being a rumour network and all) that Virgin is offering about 210K including super. That would put your base pay at about 190K AUD (170K USD/630K Dirham/116K Euros/87K GBP and 1280K Rand), losing about another 45% of that in tax, depending on your situation of course. My understanding is that this is way below the going rate for a 777 skipper. So back to the crunch.....pilots from overseas coming home and "taking" (please note inverted comma's people) jobs from local people. And yes, a lot of expats ARE local people, but once again are they coming home and accepting lower T&C's just to get home. If its that rosey overseas, why the clamour for these jobs. If Virgin had to pay the going rate I dont think the animosity that exists today would be as dividing to our profession, and that would be a very good thing. So shockwave, please dont lecture us about our race to the bottom when the race is infact being won at the moment by (apparantly) the expats wanting to come home. Your argument is self defeating
Then when you reach the limit of what you are prepared to swallow your companies turn around and say we can't get enough crew, lets import them from overseas!
So you lose again!
But then again, I have no idea.